2016 Delaware Individual Artist Fellows

Ramona DeFelice Long
Literature: Fiction
“Running an arts-based business is difficult because it’s a soft industry,” she says, “No one *needs* to write a novel, whereas someone needs to have their house built. But I really approach it like a business.”

Siobhan Carroll
Literature: Fiction
“I am living my 8-year-old dream,” she says. “It’s kind of a little more complicated than when I was 8 years old, but I hope that at least so far in life I haven’t lost touch with that desire to tell a story that entertains people.”

Lisa Dill
Literature: Creative Nonfiction
“I’ve never written, certainly at that length, the science of a thing,” the Wilmington resident says. It’s an unexpected confession — Dill’s storytelling is as authoritative as it is comprehensible. ”

Diane Lorio
Visual Arts: Painting
“I think the biggest problem with people who are artists is that they don’t own that they are. You have to own the label. Own it.”

Ron Meick
Visual Arts: Works on Paper
“[Living in Europe]…(was) where I developed a real passion for the arts,” Meick says. “Things are just much, much older than the things around here. It was important.”

Joshua Meier
Visual Arts: Photography
“I can’t do the same type of work here” as in Montana or Oklahoma, Meier says, “but I found myself in Delaware, and I’m starting to become attracted to the idea of all the water.”

Abby Millager
Literature: Playwriting
“Dramatic speech needs to sound plausible as normal conversation, but it really isn’t,” Millager says. “It’s the way we’d speak if we had a chance to think it all out ahead of time — every line a zinger.”

Kiandra Parks
Media Arts: Video/Film
“At this point in my life,” she says, “I don’t want to do something that doesn’t matter to me.”

Maggie Rowe
Literature: Poetry
“Publishing’s a tough business, but I’ll say to everyone, to all the quiet poets out there, that it’s easier to get your work published if you send it out than if it stays safe in a drawer in your room.”

Phillip Scarpone
Visual Arts: Sculpture
“I am interested in how recalling a moment, space or experience, diluting it and filtering it through a mental sieve can create new poetry in what we find important.”

Bruce Tychinski
Music: Solo Recital
“I think I started through osmosis to pick up his love for the instrument.”

J. Barbagallo
Literature: Fiction
“The only thing I remember saying or thinking was that I wanted to be a writer,” she says. “But writing poetry is not something that I really thought about seriously since I started writing fiction in the last few years.”

Linda Celestian
Visual Arts: Painting
“I can’t always control it [paint]. Because a lot of the imagery has to do with water, fluid paint flows the way water would flow. So these images tend to come out looking like things from nature without me even trying that hard.”

Sherry Gage Chappelle
Literature: Poetry
“I’ll often be thinking about a poem while I walk; I try and walk every day. Then something will come to me and I’ll go, Oh, I think that’ll work really well.” Photo credit: Sue Fortier

Victor Letonoff
Literature: Creative Nonfiction
“‘I have to tell you the truth,’ the police sergeant says, “I’m not really a people person. I mean, I don’t like crowds. I don’t like going out. I’m a homebody. But as far as my career or my job is concerned, I enjoy people.”

Zaneta Zubkova
Visual Arts: Works on Paper
“Color is an emotional aspect of painting for me,” she says, “so I take liberties with local color to be expressive….”