Bywater Books is pleased to announce that Paula Martinac has been named a 2019 Artist Fellowship Recipient of the North Carolina Arts Council.
Raleigh, N.C. (October 21, 2019) — Eighteen artists across North Carolina have received fellowship awards from the N.C. Arts Council in the literary categories of fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting and playwriting and in the musical categories of composition and songwriting.
Recipients were selected by panels comprised of artists and arts professionals with discipline-specific expertise and experience. The recognition of these artists with the fellowship is one of the many ways the N.C. Arts Council supports diverse and innovative artists living and working in our state.
The Artist Fellowship Program operates on a two-year rotating cycle by discipline.
Martinac channels her creative energies into writing LGBTQ-themed historical fiction, animating the history of this often-overlooked minority. The significant engagement of LGBTQ Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement is one of the subjects she addresses in her novels.
“Many of the challenges LGBTQ people faced in the past—job discrimination, lack of social acceptance and civil rights—still resonate today,” she says. “Yet mainstream history has mostly erased the impact LGBTQ Americans have had on social justice, political, and cultural movements in this country. As a rule, our history isn’t taught in schools or heralded by families of origin because it’s been attached to shame, and even sin.”
