The Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) award will support general operations of the 34th annual Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, which will be held in June 2026.

Les Helmuth, interim manager of the SVBF, said this marks the first time the festival has received an NEA grant. 鈥淚t鈥檚 amazing to be recognized by the NEA for the quality of the artists and other key individuals involved in creating great music for the Shenandoah Valley,鈥� he said. 鈥淚t鈥檚 truly an honor to be the recipient of an NEA grant.鈥�

Bach Festival Artistic Director and EMU Music Program Director David Berry noted that receiving support from the NEA has long been a prestigious mark of distinction for any arts organization. “We’re grateful the NEA has chosen to support the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival as we celebrate our 34th year next June,” he said. “This honor speaks to how special the festival truly is and its great legacy of beautiful music-making.”

Amanda Gookin, previous executive director of the SVBF, wrote and applied for the GAP grant. It is one of more than 1,100 GAP awards nationwide, totaling more than $31.8 million, announced by the NEA on Tuesday.

鈥淭he NEA is proud to continue our nearly 60 years of supporting the efforts of organizations and artists that help to shape our country鈥檚 vibrant arts sector and communities of all types across our nation,鈥� said NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson, PhD. 鈥淚t is inspiring to see the wide range of creative projects taking place, including EMU鈥檚 Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival.鈥�

About the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival

The annual weeklong summer festival presents vibrant performances on the EMU campus and in Downtown Harrisonburg, Virginia, by Bach Festival Musicians and guest artists, the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival Orchestra, Baroque Academy Faculty, and Festival Choir. Learn more at:

About the National Endowment for the Arts

Established by Congress in 1965, the NEA is an independent federal agency that is the largest funder of the arts and arts education in communities nationwide and a catalyst of public and private support for the arts. Its Grants for Arts Projects (GAP) provides expansive funding opportunities to strengthen the nation鈥檚 arts and cultural ecosystem, including opportunities for public engagement with the arts and arts education, for the integration of the arts with strategies promoting the health and well-being of people and communities, and for the improvement of overall capacity and capabilities within the arts sector.

Speaking at the final event, a service marking Palm Sunday, Wiebe touched on the way writers work in silence, enveloped in the mystery of writing. Yet when writers and readers meet, their 鈥渕utual silences open to listening.鈥�

There was little silence at this conference, dubbed 鈥淢ennonite/s Writing VI.鈥� Packed into the two days, one evening and one morning were: an oratorio featuring the poetry of one of the conference participants, Jean Janzen of California; two dramatic 聽performances and an equal number of music events; at least 30 readings from original poems, works of fiction and memoirs; and plenty of talks on such weighty topics as the intersection of theology and poetry (鈥渢heopoetics鈥�), on teaching writing and literature, and on what it means to be a Mennonite or to write in a Mennonite manner. Critics of literature formed one panel discussion and publishers of literature formed another.

Some participants left the campus to take a guided tour of the MennoMedia offices a block away or a different tour to Singers Glen, eight miles to the west of EMU, where the oldest continually used hymnal in the United States was first published by a local Mennonite man, Joseph Funk.

Kirsten Beachy, an EMU assistant professor who was co-chair of the conference, smilingly summed up the conference with these words: 鈥淲e feasted together on words and on food.鈥�

Throughout the conference, participants often credited Wiebe and Julia Spicher Kasdorf, a poet and conference co-chair, with inspiring other Mennonite writers by producing seminal works that challenged the insularity of the traditional Mennonite church-community in North America鈥攈e in 1962 with his first novel, Peace Shall Destroy Many, and she in 1992 with her first book of poetry, Sleeping Preacher.

Well-known poet and essayist Gregory Orr, a University of Virginia professor who is not a Mennonite, attracted one of the largest crowds assembled in one location to hear his talk on 鈥渆thics, aesthetics and the lyric.鈥� He advocated that writers be true to themselves and 鈥渂reak with the overculture,鈥� a message that resonated with his Mennonite audience in two ways鈥攕ome have worked hard to find their voice within the 鈥渙verculture鈥� of their original community, while many view themselves as belonging to a minority culture that often goes against the grain of the mainstream culture.

On Friday evening, Vern Thiessen, one of the most-produced playwrights in Canada, performed two roles鈥攖hat of himself and of his father鈥攊n 鈥淏ack to Berlin,鈥� his play exploring how his father (and by extension other Mennonites in Germany) acquiesced to or collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

Writers who received formal tributes at the Saturday evening banquet were Ervin Beck, Goshen College professor emeritus; Omar Eby, EMU professor emeritus; Al Reimer, professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg; Elaine Sommers Rich, author of the 1964 children鈥檚 book Hannah Elizabeth; and Katie Funk Wiebe, a prolific essayist who taught at Tabor College before her retirement.

The EMU conference received support from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from Conrad Grebel University College in Ontario and private donors. It was the sixth gathering in North America since 1990 of writers who have a Mennonite background, who delve into Mennonite themes in their works, or who simply have an interest in this field. Photos are online at emu.edu/photos/mennonites-writing-vi-conference/

草莓社区 (EMU) will host a March 29-April 1. The sixth in a series of Mennonite Writing conferences in the United States and Canada, the conference comes to the East Coast of the United States for the first time this spring.

鈥淚f you love to read or write, whether you鈥檙e Mennonite, MennoNot, or Menno-curious, this conference is for you,鈥� said conference co-chair , assistant professor of at EMU.

鈥淢ennonite/s Writing VI: Solos and Harmonies鈥� will feature a performance by Canadian Mennonite playwright Vern Thiessen and a reading and lecture by Charlottesville, Va., poet Greg Orr. A growing list of Mennonite scholars and writers, including Katherine Arnoldi, Stephen Raleigh Byler, Todd Davis, Dora Dueck, Jeff Gundy, Ann Hostetler, Jean Janzen, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Keith Ratzlaff, Sofia Samatar, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Rudy Wiebe will share their work.

Several events are open to the public, including a kick-off poetry reading followed by an orchestra concert on Thursday evening; a Friday night performance by Vern Thiessen of Back to Berlin, a funny and lyrical look at a father and son on a trip to Berlin to discover secrets lying in the city鈥攁nd in the father鈥檚 past; a lecture on 鈥淓thics, Aesthetics, and the Lyric鈥� by Charlottesville poet Gregory Orr Saturday morning, followed by a reading of his poetry. The conference will close with a Sunday morning meditation by Rudy Wiebe.

The festival program for conference registrants includes over seventy different presentations: readings, scholarly paper presentations, writing workshops, performances, book-signings, excursions and feasting. 鈥淥ur cup is full and running over when it comes to the program,鈥� said Beachy. 鈥淵ou can鈥檛 possibly see everything offered during the weekend, but you鈥檒l have a lot of great options. It鈥檚 a good reflection of the abundant and diverse voices coming out of Mennonite faith and culture.鈥�

The conference committee, co-chaired by Spicher Kasdorf, includes Mennonite writers and scholars from Bluffton, Goshen and EMU. Conrad Grebel University College (Waterloo, Ont.), co-sponsors the conference, and committee member of Conrad Grebel convened the first Mennonite writing conference there in 1990.

The conference is sponsored in part by the , the and the Marpeck Foundation.

For more information contact Kirsten Eve Beachy at kirsten.beachy@emu.edu. The full conference schedule and online registration can be found at .

Special rates are available for students and seniors.

Critically-acclaimed writer Robert Morgan will read and discuss his poetry 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 3, in Lehman Auditorium at 草莓社区.

Morgan, who teaches at Cornell University, was featured speaker for a "" last year at EMU, where he read from his best-selling novels Gap Creek, The Truest Pleasure and Brave Enemies as well as from his latest poetry collection, The Strange Attractor.

He will focus on poetry this time since EMU’s advanced writing classes are studying Morgan’s The Strange Attractor, according to , associate professor of English at EMU.

Morgan’s writings poems have appeared in magazines such as Poetry, Paris Review, Antaeus, The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, TriQuarterly, Missouri Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and in many anthologies. A craft interview was included in the Brockport Writers Forum video series.

He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Southern Poetry Review prize, the Eunice Tietjens prize for poetry and the New York Foundation.

The poetry reading is open to the public free of charge.