Carla Du Pree

Carla Du Pree is a literary artist, a state arts ambassador and the executive director of CityLit Project, a literary nonprofit that nurtures readers and writers throughout the region, featuring regional and transnational authors through two signature events, an award-winning daylong festival and the CityLit Stage at the Baltimore Book Festival. Du Pree is a recipient of several fiction fellowships, including a Hedgebrook Fellowship (2019), Rhode Island Writers Colony for Writers of Color (2018), Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Poetry Foundation (2017), a Rubys Artist Grant (2016) and a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award (2011). Excerpts from her novel have been published in several literary journals and two anthologies.

She was selected by the Maryland State Department of Education as the April 2020 Arts Leader in the Spotlight. Du Pree has spoken on national platforms with Furious Flower Poetry Center, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, National Women’s Studies Association and Association of Writers & Writing Programs and as a literary consultant for the 2018 Robert W. Deutsch Foundation’s Artist Retreat. She was reappointed for an unprecedented third term to the Maryland State Arts Council, where she was the former vice chair, and headed the Council’s Diversity Outreach Committee. Du Pree serves on the boards of Maryland Citizens for the Arts and Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance. She has done contractual work with the National Endowment for the Arts, has served on the Maryland Humanities One Maryland One Book Selection Committee and advises NASAA’s Affinity Group for People of Color. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from The Johns Hopkins University and mentors young poets and writers throughout the country. (Board term: 2019-2024)