Tracy Kidder, Amherst Cinema, María Luisa Arroyo and Community Access to the Arts to Receive the 2016 Arts & Humanities Award

March 2, 2016 Springfield, Mass.

New England Public Radio is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s Arts & Humanities Awards. The 2016 honorees are: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder; independent arts center Amherst Cinema; Springfield Massachusetts’ first poet laureate, María Luisa Arroyo; and Community Access to the Arts of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, which celebrates the creativity of people with disabilities through shared experiences in the visual and performing arts.

“We are thrilled to receive this prestigious award from NEPR honoring CATA’s innovative work nurturing and celebrating the creativity of people with disabilities,” said Margaret Keller, Executive Director of CATA. “This kind of public recognition is especially gratifying since it speaks so directly to CATA’s mission to draw the wider community into connection with our CATA artists.”

Recipients will be celebrated at the 8th Annual Arts & Humanities Awards Gala, May 10, 2016 at the Log Cabin in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Nick Spitzer, host of American Routes will join the celebration as the keynote speaker. Music and entertainment reflective of this year’s recipients will round out the festive evening. Tickets ($75) will be available soon at NEPR.net. Proceeds support the programs and services of New England Public Radio.

“Being recognized by NEPR is especially meaningful this year, as we celebrate our 10 years as a regional destination for the arts and offer a rich and growing array of programs onscreen,” said Carol Johnson, Amherst Cinema’s Executive Director.

“We are happy to recognize these worthy nominees in 2016, and so pleased to have received the most nominations from the community in the award’s history this year,” said Stephen Wittenberg, chair of the NEPR Foundation’s engagement committee. “This is really a community-wide effort in acknowledging the great talent we are lucky to have here in the Valley.”

Established by the New England Public Radio Foundation, Inc. in 2008, the NEPR Arts & Humanities Awards have been recognizing the rich and varied arts scene in the region ever since. The award celebrates the contributions of local talent and brings public awareness to the critical role played by musicians, artists, dancers, actors, writers, storytellers and teachers in western New England.

2016 Award Winners:

Amherst Cinema

Now celebrating its 10th year, Amherst Cinema is an independent, nonprofit arts center that presents first-run independent film and world cinema on four screens and offers HD productions from internationally known theater and dance companies. In addition, Amherst Cinema creates film series unique to the theater, hosts filmmakers at screenings of their works, and serves school children through its education program, See-Hear-Feel-Film. In 2015, Amherst Cinema screened programs in more than 20 languages and drew over 112,000 audience members from throughout western New England. And as one nominator pointed out, “the new vitality of the Amherst downtown is further testament to the magnet that Amherst Cinema has become for western New England’s arts community, and the power of the “creative economy.”

María Luisa Arroyo

Multilingual Puerto Rican poet and educator María Luisa Arroyo is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Springfield, Massachusetts. Many of Ms. Arroyo’s poems, published widely in journals such as CALYX, and in anthologies such as Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, negotiate the oftentimes hidden, ignored, or rationalized realities of childhood abuse and domestic violence. A 2004 Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Fellow, Ms. Arroyo had her first collection of poems, Gathering Words/Recogiendo Palabras, published by Bilingual Press (2008). Since 2004, Ms. Arroyo has facilitated community-based poetry workshops and readings regularly in partnership with the Springfield Public Libraries and has performed her work regionally and widely, including in Chicago, DC, Boston, and Puerto Rico. A proud product of Springfield Public Schools in an era when a well-rounded education automatically included the arts, Ms. Arroyo went on to earn degrees at Colby (BA), Tufts (MA), and Harvard (ABD) in German language and literature; and in July 2015, she earned an MFA in creative writing at Pine Manor College.

Community Access to the Arts (CATA)

Now in its 23rd year, Community Access to the Arts (CATA) provides over 1,000 arts workshops annually to 600 individuals with disabilities across Berkshire County, Massachusetts. With a mission to nurture and celebrate the creativity of people with disabilities through shared experiences in the visual and performing arts, CATA draws the public into its vibrant work through performances and exhibits, shining a light on the ability within disability. CATA’s arts workshops and public events give individuals with disabilities the chance to share their voices and their perspectives on the world.

Through CATA, art becomes a vehicle for social change – a powerful means of creating community and affirming our common humanity. As one nominator put it, “CATA’s message, one of inclusivity, one that recognizes the talents and abilities of ‘the disabled’ and promotes and celebrates the artist and performer, resonates and reverberates in our western Massachusetts communities.”

Tracy Kidder

From his home in western Massachusetts, Tracy Kidder writes books that invite their readers to take a journey with him. Whether that journey is traveling to Haiti with Dr. Paul Farmer, a single-minded physician bent on improving the health of some of the poorest people on the planet in Mountains Beyond Mountains, or to Burundi where the incredible story of a young man named Deo begins in The Strength of What Remains, Kidder’s passionate and profound writings have inspired thousands of readers to think about the global issues that affect us all. Closer to home, his portrait of small-town life in Northampton, Massachusetts in Home Town, and the engaging peek into building a family home, from blueprint to the last coat of paint, invite readers to get close, to see the small, seemingly mundane, details of modern life in a new way. Winner of both The Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Award, Kidder’s most recent book, Good Prose: The Art of Non-Fiction, was co-authored by his friend and editor of more than forty years, Richard Todd, and is an inspiring manifesto on what makes good writing. He is currently at work on a new book that will be released by Random House this fall.

For more information on the NEPR Arts & Humanities Awards, please visit: http://digital.nepr.net/events/2015/05/02/2016-arts-and-humanities/