Sandy Hook Resident Awarded NEA Grant

Charles Rafferty is in very good company this month, at least considering some of the fellow Connecticut residents and organizations who have been named recipients of 2009 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Grant Awards.

Mr Rafferty, of Sandy Hook, is among 42 residents of the US to receive a $25,000 Grant Award: Literature Fellowship (Poetry). The grant is to, according to the NEA, support a creative writing fellowship.

Mr Rafferty’s is among at least 12 grants awarded to individuals or groups in Connecticut.

Goodspeed Musicals, which received a $30,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant for the development of a new musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s book James and the Giant Peach. The show is not affiliated with a nonmusical stage version of Dahl’s book already being staged elsewhere.

Other 2009 NEA grants have been announced for Yale Repertory Theatre for its production of Octavio Solis’s Lydia ($35,000); Long Wharf Theatre for its upcoming production of The Old Man and the Sea ($30,000) and for its Elder Play Project ($15,000); The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center for its National Playwrights Conference and its Music Theater Conference ($20,000).

Also, New Haven’s 2009 International Festival for Arts & Ideas received a financial boost ($20,000); Hartford Jazz Society for its Jazz-at-the-Atheneum series ($10,000); Hartford’s Real Art Ways for an exhibit series and catalogs on emerging artists in New York and New England ($10,000); Wesleyan University’s Breaking Ground Dance Series and DanceMasters Weekend ($10,000) and for publication of books of poetry ($35,000).

The Arts Council of Greater New Haven will use its $10,000 grant for enhancing its website; Danbury-based Aston Magna Festival, featuring concerts in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. and Great Barrington and Williamstown, Mass., received a $10,000 award; and New Haven Symphony Orchestra also received $10,000, which will be used toward its Connecticut Youth Orchestra Festival ($10,000).