DIANE GILLIAM'S proposed grant project for A Room of Her Own's gift is a book of poems titled The Blackbirds Too. In it,  Gilliam will map the course of “identity accomplished by breakage of the structures a person might depend on to become someone: work, knowledge, marriage, family, goodness. The culture at large defines our first versions of such things, and it seems inevitable that as we grow into ourselves, the received definitions begin to fail us.”

 

Gilliam describes the Gift of Freedom grant as “actual, practical help for women who need to do their work in a world that often doesn’t know how much it needs that work, and as a sacred trust that heartens us, binds us to our work and to each other.”