The Millay Colony for the Arts offers comprehensive residencies to visual artists, writers and composers at Steepletop, the hilltop property in Austerlitz, NY where the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) lived and wrote for 25 years. A not-for-profit organization, the Millay Colony was founded in 1973 by the poet's sister Norma Millay Ellis, whose goal was to honor Millay's life and work and to enable other artists to be inspired by Steepletop's natural beauty.

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in Rockland, Maine on February 22, 1892. She published her first poem, Renascence, at age twenty. The poem attracted attention from other poets and a benefactor who helped her win a scholarship to Vassar College. In 1917, after Millay's first book, Renascence and Other Poems, was published and she had graduated from Vassar, she moved to Greenwich Village and quickly became part of the literary milieu in New York. She also earned a reputation as a proponent of progressive, anti-war politics.

Millay and her sister Norma soon became members of the Provincetown Theatre Group, and in 1918, Millay directed and took the lead in her own play, The Princess Marries the Page. In the next several years, she explored sexuality and feminism in her poems and attracted a series of high-profile lovers. By 1923, her poetic reputation on the rise, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Throughout the next few decades, she continued to publish poetry including sonnets that are still widely praised as exemplars of the form.

In addition to poetry and plays, Millay also wrote an opera libretto and fiction under the pen name of Nancy Boyd. She continued to be active in progressive political causes and in 1927, she was arrested for protesting the proposed execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Millay wrote several poems about the Sacco-Vanzetti Case including the well-known Justice Denied in Massachusetts. Edmund Wilson deemed Millay "a spokesman for the human spirit."

In 1923, Millay married the Dutch merchant Eugen Boissevain. Their progressive "open marriage" was a source of both controversy and admiration. In the mid-1920's, they purchased a 635-acre blueberry farm in Austerlitz, a country hamlet north of Manhattan in Columbia County, New York. The farm could only be reached by driving up a narrow dirt road that wound through two miles of forest to the crest of a hill. At the top of a hill was Millay's house, a simple Victorian home presiding over blueberry fields and wide vistas of the Berkshire Mountains. Millay named the property "Steepletop" after a flowering bush that grew in the fields, and here she lived, worked, and hosted contemporaries from the literary and art world from 1925 until her death in 1950.

In 1951, the poet's sister, Norma Millay Ellis and her husband, the painter Charles Ellis, came to live at Steepletop, where they continued Millay's legacy of artistic pursuit and unconventional living.

In 1973, Norma founded The Millay Colony for the Arts as a residency center for visual artists, writers and composers. The first artists arrived in 1974 and resided in an apartment that included a large studio over a garage. In 1976, Norma deeded the barn her sister had built from a Sears & Roebuck kit to the Colony. It was renovated to accommodate four additional artists, and is known as the Steepletop Barn. Norma Millay Ellis died in 1986 at the age of 92. The Millay home, a National Historic Landmark, is owned and maintained by the Edna St. Vincent Millay Society.

In the mid-1990's, the Millay Colony brought together a team of six artists with disabilities to design a building for the Colony using the principles of universal design. The resulting building is a lovely structure that houses the Colony's main facilities and offices as well as two rooms and studios and a kitchen, dining room and lounge/library. This highly functional environment is also intended to serve as a prototype for other organizations looking to increase access to their facilities. The project was supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. This building, which is featured in the July '98 issue of Architectural Record, was opened in 1997.

Now in its 35th season, the Millay Colony has already offered residencies to nearly 2,000 artists from the U.S. and abroad.

With the recent sale of some of the Steepletop property for inclusion in Harvey Mountain State Forest, the Colony is poised to grow in future years. Board and staff have developed a Long Range Planning Committee to study future options. Stay tuned...