2021 SUmmer GrAntees

Literature Grantee - Emily Hockaday

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Literature Grant to Emily Hockaday for her poetry collection, “Woman in a Body,” which explores chronic illness and its effect on the body and spirit. The poems ruminate on where bodies—human, plant, and animal—fit into their ecosystems, and what that means for a temporary human body struggling to thrive. The manuscript also considers the effects of chronic illness on family dynamics and mental health.

Emily Hockaday is a poet and editor living in Queens. Her first full-length collection, Naming the Ghost, will be out with Cornerstone Press in November 2022. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Starting a Life (Finishing Line Press 2012), What We Love & Will Not Give Up (Dancing Girl Press 2014), Ophelia: A Botanist’s Guide (Zoo Cake Press 2015), Space on Earth (Grey Book Press 2019), and the forthcoming Beach Vocabulary (Red Bird Chaps). Her poems have appeared in numerous print and online journals, as well as with the Poets of Queens and Parks & Points’ Wayfinding anthologies.

Literature Grantee - Jennifer Franklin

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Literature Grant to Jennifer Franklin for her upcoming third book, “If Some God Shakes Your House”, published by Four Way Books in 2023. A third of the collection are lyric poems written in the voice of a contemporary Antigone, (the ancient heroine who recognizes her familial duty), who lives in NYC, works, and cares for her disabled daughter. She tries to give her child a semblance of a normal life even as she knows the futility of her project. She extricates herself from her uncle's control as she grapples with her past and the series of choices that led her to her devotion and moral sacrifice.

Jennifer Franklin has published two full-length collections, most recently No Small Gift (Four Way Books, 2018). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Gettysburg Review, JAMA, The Nation, Paris Review, “poem-a-day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, and Rhino.

Literature Grantee - Ross Perlin

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Literature Grant to Ross Perlin, a linguist, writer, and translator focused on exploring and supporting linguistic diversity. Since 2013, he has been co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, spearheading research projects focused on language documentation, mapping, policy, and public programming. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, and other outlets, and his book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy started an international conversation about unpaid labor. Ross also teaches linguistics at Columbia University.

Ross’ new book is about endangered languages in New York City: the individuals and communities from all over the world that speak them, and the fight to keep them going.

Literature Grantee - Shahnaz Habib

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Literature Grant to Shahnaz Habib for “Airplane Mode”, (Catapault, forthcoming), a personal and cultural history of tourism from the perspective of a Third World-raised Muslim woman for whom travel has always been a complicated pleasure.

Shahnaz is also the translator of the novel Jasmine Days, for which she and the author Benyamin won the JCB Prize, India's most valuable prize for literature. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker online, Creative Nonfiction, Agni, Brevity, The Guardian, and Afar. She has twice been awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Artists' Fellowship in Nonfiction Literature, and her work has been cited in the Best American Essays series multiple times. Shahnaz teaches writing at The New School and Bay Path University, and consults for the United Nations.

Performance Grantees - Daniel Bernard Roumain

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Performance Grant to Daniel Bernard Roumain to continue his work on The All Sing “Here Lies Joy”, which will be performed on January 8 at 2pm at Times Square for 15 minutes!

Daniel Bernard Roumain’s acclaimed work as a composer, performer, educator, and activist spans more than two decades, earning him commissions by venerable artists and institutions worldwide. The All Sing brings more than 1,000 people together to weave a vibrant tapestry of sound, poetic justice, and hope. From the voices who tread the boards of some of our most hallowed stages to those who tread the tiles of their shower, all are welcome in this ebullient celebration of connection, community, and our capacity for joy. Together we will craft an unforgettable moment and sing for a return to a more just, healthy, and music-filled life in a post-COVID world.

Performance Grantees - Eve Sussman | Simon Lee | Algis Kizys

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Performance Grant to Eve Sussman, Simon Lee and Algis Kizys for their project radioOradio, a multidisciplinary radioplay performed with visual improvisation. The piece combines traditions of theatre and radioplay with improvisational VJ editing. As radioOradio is voiced by actors in the theatre, the performance is edited on-the-fly by the three directors streaming images to a screen viewed by a live audience. By incorporating the traditions of radioplay with live VJ mixing, a free flowing dramatic process gives rise to improvisations that change with every performance.

Music Grantee - Magos Herrera

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Music Grant to Magos Herrera to complete her new project, “Tropical”, a recording with her Quartet and The Knights Orchestra. This project will produce a body of work that convene conversations among 3 musical traditions Jazz, Classical and Latin American music in a contemporary, imaginative way that is the cross cultural sound of today’s plural America.

"Tropicalizar" according to Magos means the constant cultural exchange and assimilation process that shapes new musical conversations in all directions by creating a deeper understanding of where we come from, who we are and how we can all create new richer paradigms. 

Music Grantee - Max Johnson

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Music Grant to Max Johnson who will complete a studio recording of four works of chamber music. The works were composed by Max Johnson between 2016-2021 featuring a quintet of fabulous performers: Lauren Cauley, Carrie Frey, Maria Hadge, Lucy Hatem, and Fifi Zhang.

This will be the first album to feature the chamber music of Max Johnson, and will be recorded at The Bunker in Brooklyn, NY in the fall of 2021, set for a release in the Spring/Summer of 2022.

Music Grantee - SunDub

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Music Grant to SunDub to help complete their sophomore album. Deeply moved by awakenings and events that characterized 2020 like the Black Lives Matter movement, the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the collective grief of the world amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, lead vocalist and lyricist Joanna Teters took up a pen and began writing. Over the course of the year, SunDub wrote and demoed 13 songs in the band's home studio, Jackson Yard, and devised a plan to track their second album in a professional-level recording studio.

Finally, in May 2021, SunDub recorded the basic tracks for their forthcoming sophomore studio album at Lydate Studios alongside engineer and co-producer Sidney Mills, longtime member of the legendary and Grammy-award winning reggae band Steel Pulse. Now, back in Brooklyn, the band continues to chip away at completing these songs: recording final vocals, tracking more guitar, percussion and auxiliary instruments before handing them off for mixing and mastering ahead of the April 2022 release.

Visual Grantee - John Mendelsohn

The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2021 Summer Visual Grant to John Mendelsohn for his New Color Wheel paintings, which will expand on his previous series, with circular forms and rays of color projecting from their centers.

The New Color Wheel paintings are on a larger scale, with an expanded range of colors, and with paint applied with a more varied facture and energy. These paintings’ radiating forms conjured up the phrase “a song of flowering and fading” – a poetic motive and a way to consider the beauty and tenuousness of our lives.