A major project of Mānoa Foundation was a Hawai‘i writing residency honoring Barry Lopez and emphasizing a spirit of social responsibility. The annual award was given to a writer whose work contributed to an awareness of the civic and ethical obligation of artists; helped us understand, through storytelling, that the survival of a humane world depends upon a commitment to integrity, empathy, and compassionate reconciliation; and inspired us to take social responsibility for the perils, which we have created ourselves, to the human and non-human world.
2019 Recipient
Playwright and human-rights activist Catherine Filloux lives in NYC. Her plays have been produced around the world, and a collection of six of them, Eyes of the Heart, was published in 2017.
2018 Recipient
Anna Badkhen, journalist, war reporter, and nonfiction writer, was selected as the 2018 recipient of the residency. Displaced Lives, the winter 2019 issue of Manoa, opens with her story “Borderlands.”
2016 Recipient
With funding received in part through a Kickstarter campaign, Ann Pancake was selected as the first recipient. In May, she gave an extended talk on the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa campus.