$50,000 Scholarship Supports Educational and Artistic Development
MIAMI, FL (February 15, 2024) – YoungArts announces Audie Waller as the recipient of the 2024 YoungArts Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, a $50,000 scholarship given each year to a YoungArts award winner in Writing. Waller may apply the financial award against the cost of tuition, room and board to attend an accredited school of her choice.
Now in its seventh year, the award demonstrates how individual donor support for YoungArts award winners can create transformative opportunities for artists throughout their careers. The Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award is part of YoungArts’ ongoing programmatic expansion, offering additional creative and professional development opportunities for artists throughout their careers.
“For the 2024 YoungArts Lin Arison Excellence in Writing Award, our panel selected Audie Waller, whose fiction exhibits an extraordinary emotional intelligence, precision of language, and insight into character and human experience,” said YoungArts Writing Panelist Christopher Castellani (1990 & 1992 YoungArts Winner in Writing). “Audie’s sentences are coiled springs, achingly tense with subtext, and rendered with the mastery of an artist confident in her craft; reading them is like skating on the surface of a crystal-clear lake and knowing life—in all its richness and complexity and vibrancy—is teeming beneath you. Audie has the soul of a writer and is, more importantly, a ‘serious noticer’ with the drive and the dedication and love of process necessary to sustain a lifelong practice. We are honored to provide this support at the beginning of what will surely be a remarkable career.”
“I am honored and absolutely overjoyed,” said Audie Waller. “Sometimes when I tell people I am going into creative writing, they kind of scrunch up their faces or laugh and say, ‘good luck on the mortgage!’ or warn me considerately that art is doomed, and artificial intelligence is going to take my job. At YoungArts, however, I received nothing but encouragement—from my panelists, my peers, guest artists and resident advisors. I have never felt so supported in my dreams and my passion, and I am thrilled to enter the next phase of my life with that network of support behind me. My experience at YoungArts instilled in me, without a doubt, that I am a writer, and that we need writing, and that what we do as writers and as artists is important.”
Audie Waller is a writer from Greenville, South Carolina. Her work has been published in Cargoes literary magazine, after winning a second-place prize for the Nancy Thorp Poetry Contest, and in Crashtest literary magazine. She spends much of her time contemplating the apocalypse, the German language, and time travel.
About YoungArts
Established in 1981 by Lin and Ted Arison, YoungArts identifies exceptional young artists, amplifies their potential, and invests in their lifelong creative freedom. YoungArts provides space, funding, mentorship, professional development and community throughout artists’ careers. Entrance into this prestigious organization starts with a highly competitive application for talented artists ages 15–18, or grades 10–12, in the United States that is judged by esteemed discipline-specific panels of artists through a rigorous blind adjudication process.
For more information, visit youngarts.org, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter.
