Beyoncé recently announced the first four colleges that will be participating in her Formation Scholarship program. (Aptly named after her famous “Formation” song/video). Boston’s Berklee College of Music, Howard University, Spelman College, and Parsons School of Design will each award one scholarship per year to female students studying creative arts, music, literature, or African-American studies. The goal of the scholarships are to, “support young women who
are unafraid to think outside the box and are bold, creative, conscious and confident.”

As an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, I was the first women to receive the Louisa Saul Rosenthal Margaret Morrison Scholarship for Women in Creative Writing, and as a result got to know the founder of the fund and represent the scholarship for several years. To this day, I direct all of my donations to that fund in the hopes it will continue to fund other women writers. I am excited to see what wonderful women are selected to be the first scholars! I hope that Beyoncé’s program is successful and is able to grow to add more colleges or funded spots in the next few years. Congratulations to Beyoncé, and a future congratulations to the scholarship recipients!

The announcement is up on Beyonce’s website.