Indiana University East assistant professor of English, Jean Harper, has received a springtime residency to Yaddo. The artists’ community is located in Saratoga Springs, New York and offers a sanctuary for creative and professional artists.

TJ Rivard, chair of the Humanities and Fine Arts Division, said the residency was an honor for Jean to receive.

“Jean’s residency at Yaddo will place her among some of the most important literary figures of the last century who also were awarded residencies there – writers like Flannery O’Connor, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, and Saul Bellow. As IU East strives to become a first-choice campus for students in East Central Indiana, it will become more and more important to retain faculty who are being recognized nationally for their talent,” Rivard said.

Spencer Trask, a financer, and his wife, Katrina, a poet, founded Yaddo 1900 with the mission of providing artists with nurturing work environment where they can work undisturbed. Residencies are offered to artists from a wide-range of genres including choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video. Individual artists or group artists receiving a residency are provided with a studio, room and board.

Yaddo has produced 61 Pulitzer Prize winners, 56 National Book Awards, 22 National Book Critics Circle Awards and a Noble Prize. A roster of well-known visiting artists include Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Aaron Copland, Philip Guston, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Ulysses Kay, Jacob Lawrence, Sylvia Plath, Katherine Anne Porter, Mario Puzo, Clyfford Still, and Virgil Thomson.