Congratulations to Jasper Project Board President Wade Sellers for Being Honored as a 2025 Recipient of the SC Governor's Award for the Arts!

CONGRATULATIONS WADE!

The SC Arts Commission announced today that the Jasper Project’s own president of our board of directors, Wade Sellers, is the 2025 recipient of the South Carolina Governor’s Award for the Arts in the individual artist category!

Wade Sellers (Artist Category) is an independent filmmaker in Columbia who produced his first film within months after graduating from USC in media arts. As the South Carolina Arts Commission’s first media intern, Sellers assisted with the Southeastern Media Institute where he later became an instructor. He became an in-demand lighting director and gaffer on commercials and corporate projects. His short film Gordon’s Ride was featured at the Independent Feature Film Festival. Sellers co-founded the non-profit Hybrid Films in 2002 to function as fiscal agent for underserved filmmakers in the region. Hybrid Films’ largest accomplishment was the Beg and Grovel Film Festival, the first true independent film festival in Columbia. His first Southeastern Emmy Award nomination came with South Carolinians in World War 2, a project he was commissioned to direct for South Carolina ETV. Sellers formed his production company, Coal Powered Filmworks, collaborating with local filmmakers and promoting independent filmmaking in South Carolina. In 2013 he founded the 2nd Act Film Project, helping 84 films be created by S.C. filmmakers solely for screening at 2nd Act. He has supervised more than 25 interns from USC and Benedict College since 2008, lectured and taught in the USC media arts department and was named a distinguished alumnus from the USC School of Visual Arts and Design in 2020. He has served as the board president for The Jasper Project since 2019.

Other 2025 honorees include Dr. Gail V. Barnes, professor of music education and director of the USC String Project. The organization Engaging Creative Minds which was established in 2012 as a private-public partnership resulting from a community planning process led by Charleston County School District; the College of Charleston; the cities of Charleston, Mt. Pleasant and North Charleston; the Charleston Regional Alliance for the Arts; the Youth Endowment for the Arts; and Crystal-Barkley Corporation. The Koger Center for the Arts at the University of South Carolina (Government Category) which supports exceptional art by hosting and presenting transformational experiences that enlighten, educate, entertain and inspire.  The Sumter County Gallery of Art (Organization Category), a non-profit, community-based institution formed in 1969, with a mission to present and promote diverse visual arts and artists, to increase knowledge and to provide art education opportunities to Sumter, Clarendon and Lee counties—an extensively rural region of the state, isolated from the major art centers in the U.S. by geography and economics. The SCGA is currently under the executive direction of Karen Watson.

Congratulations to all the award winners!

Jasper is delighted to share this news and we look forward to celebrating with Wade throughout 2025!

Jasper Poetry Editor ED MADDEN Wins SC GOVERNORS AWARD FOR THE ARTS!

Congratulations Ed!

We’re delighted to report that Jasper Magazine’s own ED MADDEN is one of the recipients of the 2022 SC Governor’s Award for the Arts!

Ed has been Jasper Magazine’s POETRY EDITOR since the founding of the magazine in 2011. He has served as a major advisor to the Jasper Project as well as co-editor of Fall Lines - a literary convergence since its inception. Ed also serves as the poetry editor for our JASPER WRITES column in ONLINE JASPER.

Ed, who won in the Individual category, shares the spotlight with Darion McCloud, winner of the 2019 Jasper Project Theatre Artist of the Year, who won in the Artist category, and Carrie Ann Power who won in the Arts in Education category. One Columbia for Arts and Culture, the organization that grabbed and ran with the proposal that a City Poet Laureate position be created and that Ed Madden be seriously considered for the post, also won in the organization category.

Ed’s bio reads, “ED MADDEN (Individual Category) is a poet, activist, and a professor of English, with a focus on Irish literature, at the University of South Carolina. There, he is also director of the women’s and gender studies program. His academic areas of specialization include Irish culture; British and Irish poetry; LGBTQ literature, sexuality studies, and history of sexuality; and creative writing and poetry. In 2015, Madden was named Columbia’s first poet laureate, a post he maintains today. Madden has been a South Carolina Academy of Authors Fellow in poetry twice and was South Carolina Arts Commission Prose Fellow in 2011. He has been writer-in-residence at the Riverbanks Botanical Garden and at Fort Moultrie in Charleston as part of the state’s African American Heritage Corridor project. He also works with the South Carolina Poetry Initiative and was 2006 artist-in-residence for South Carolina State Parks. His numerous publishing and editing credits include four of his own: Nest, Ark, and Signals and the chapbook My Father’s House, runner-up for the 2011 Robin Becker Chapbook Prize.”

While we are super proud of the accomplishments listed above we’re most proud of the talents and energy that Ed shares with the community on a voluntary basis, such as the work he contributes to the Jasper Project and as the Poet Laureate of of Columbia. It’s a lovely thing to honor a person or organization for doing well the work they are commissioned to do, and it is encouraging to those individuals and organizations to continue to do well the job they are paid to do. But when someone like Ed, who is already inordinately busy directing a university academic program, maintaining and growing his art, maintaining and growing his homelife, and more, chooses to take on more responsibilities because he believes his gifts should be shared FREELY with his community — then THAT is something to celebrate.

Cheers to our friend and colleague Ed Madden, as well as to the other honorees of this year’s SC Governor’s Awards for the Arts. And thank you for making our home a better place!