This post from artist, educator, panelist and QCA community member Kahlil Almustafa has been highlighted on our website before and was originally featured on the Field’s ERPA blog. It neatly explains the peer panel process from an artist’s perspective and offers universal tips to Queens Arts Fund applicants and all artists or cultural organizations on the hunt for funds. Please read Kahlil’s insights below.

Kahlil Almustafa: The Other Side of the Table: Sitting on a Grant Panel

Khalil is the 2002 Nuyorican Grand Slam Champion and the author of four books of poetry and his debut CD CounterIntelligence.

In addition to being a talented performance poet, Almustafa is also a skilled educator, mentoring more than 100 young people each year from New York City’s five boroughs. His collection of 15 years of poetry, Growing Up Hip-Hop, is used in more than forty  classrooms nationally from the elementary to the university level.

In 2009, almustafa completed the “100 Poems For 100 Days” project where he wrote 100 poems in the first 100 days of Barack Obama’s presidency published in a collection of poems entitled, From Auction Block to Oval Office. almustafa is a recipient of the Hip-Hop Theater Festival as a grantee of the Future Aesthetics Artist Re-grant (FAAR), funded by the Ford Foundation as well as The Field’s Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) grant which receives funding from The Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund.

Almustafa is a graduate from Goddard College’s MFA Interdisciplinary Arts program.