The MaddocksBrown Award for Contemporary Poetry at USC provides funding for a travel opportunity each year to a graduate student. The recipient is acknowledged at the annual Magill Poetry Festival at USC.

Kate Partridge, the first recipient, traveled extensively to San Francisco, Joshua Tree, and Yosemite as well as New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, to explore the desert and ecology for her full-length collection of poems titled THINE. The trips allowed her to write broadly about both desert landscapes and the artists who worked there.

The second recipient, Stephanie Horvath, journeyed from the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State to the mountains of Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, and the prairie lands of Nebraska. “I had long dreamed of traveling through these areas and spending time in the national forests and grasslands so abundant in these regions. It was an incredible experience to finally live this dream and write from diverse topographies and terrains,” wrote Horvath, in a letter of gratitude to the Foundation.