South Arts has announced the 2025 recipients of its Southern Prize & State fellowship, awarding $5,000 unrestricted grants to 18 artists across nine Southern states. Among this year’s fellows are two Louisiana-based artists: writer cb of New Orleans and visual artist Edgar Cano Lopez of Natchitoches.
Price and Lopez are now in the running for the Southern Prize, a $25,000 award that will be announced later this year.
A native New Orleanian, Karisma Price is an assistant professor of English at TulaneUniversity. A poet and screenwriter, she is the author of I’m Always So Serious (SarabandeBooks, 2023) which was a New York Times Editors’Choice Pick. Her work has appeared inpublications including Poetry, Indiana Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-DaySeries, and elsewhere. She is a 2025 Whiting Award Winner in Poetry, a Cave CanemFellow, a 2023 winner of the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American PoetryReview, and was awarded the 2020 J. Howard and Barbara M. J. Wood Prize from the PoetryFoundation. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University.
Edgar Cano began his career in the visual arts by creating illustrations and scenographies fort theater during his studies at the Faculty of Arts in Xalapa, Veracruz(UV). Over more than twodecades of artistic practice, he has received numerous national and international recognitions. Mostrecently, he was awardedby theAdolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant,NY(2025),also, hereceived Best in Show at both the 61st Juried Exhibition at the Masur Museumof Art in Monroe, Louisiana, and the 16th Surreal Salon at the Baton Rouge Gallery, in 2024.He has also been the recipient of several prestigious grants, including the FONCA Young CreatorsFellowship (2010 and 2012). In 2014, Cano was selected as a member of Mexico’s NationalSystem of Art Creators SNCA(2014 and 2021) in the painting category.
Established in 2017, the Southern Prize & State Fellowships program supports artists in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. The initiative aims to address historical disparities in arts funding across the Southern United States and recognizes the contributions of artists in shaping the region’s cultural identity.
The fellowship is unrestricted, providing recipients with financial support to advance their creative practices. South Arts is a regional nonprofit arts organization headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Additional information about the 2025 fellows and the program is available here.
