April L. Freely ’04

April L. Freely ’04, of Brooklyn, N.Y.; July 9. She was a poet, essayist, and newly appointed director of the Fire Island Artist Residency at the time of her passing. During her short tenure, she launched a Social Justice Committee that was heavily involved with the Black and Brown Equity Coalition of Cherry Grove’s Juneteenth weekend. She previously worked as an associate in Columbia’s School of Social Work Writing Center from 2019 to 2020. She had been a program coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center and was the nonfiction editor at Washington Square Review. In addition to Brown, she was a graduate of the University of Iowa’s master’s program in nonfiction writing. She was a faculty member at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson (N.Y.), where she taught in the Language and Thinking program. She was the recipient of a 2020-21 Queer Arts Mentorship fellowship in literature and of awards from the Ohio Arts Council, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and the CUE Art Foundation, among others. Her work appeared in several publications, including American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and Ninth Letter. She volunteered as a labor activist and campaigned against gun violence.