This year's winners are the first graphic novelist to win the honor and a pair of poets, one of them the fellowship's first Latino recipient.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- If ever there were a cure for writer's block, it may be the Rhode Island Foundation's MacColl Johnson Fellowships.

The fellowships provide $25,000 awards, allowing recipients the freedom to concentrate on their art. The money helps them take time off from work to write, rent studio space for the solitude needed in their work, pay for workshops, head off in new directions. There are probably as many uses as artists.

This year's winners are poets Julie Danho O'Connell of North Providence and Sussy Santana of Providence, the fellowship's first Latino recipient, and Susannah Strong of Exeter, the first graphic novelist to win the honor.

The trio were chosen from about 200 applicants by a panel of four out-of-state jurors who are practicing writers and editors. As part of the fellowship, O'Connell is completing her first full-length poetry manuscript; Santana, a collection of poems and a work of fiction; and Strong, her first graphic novel and several short comics.

Here are profiles of the three winners:

Sussy Santana

In 1990, Sussy Santana emigrated from the Dominican Republic with her sister, the teenagers joining their mother in New York. It was, she says, complete culture shock.

"We struggled with learning the language and adjusting to life away from friends," says Santana, 39, who settled in Providence in 1998 and is a board member at AS220 and with Story in the Public Square at Salve Regina University's Pell Center.

Shortly after coming to the United States, Santana started a journal and that evolved into writing poetry. "Poetry is my natural medium for artistic expression," says Santana. "I was never good at comebacks or articulating how I felt, so my poems became delay reactions to my immediate emotions."

In 2010, Santana published her first book of poems, "Pelo Bueno y otros poemas (Good Hair and other poems)," inspired by the immigrant experience. She also mixes performance with her poetry, dressing as a "Marchanta," a Dominican street vendor who sells fruits or flowers — "except I was selling my poems," she writes in an email interview.

During her readings, she uses a folk voice to tell stories of Latino Americans' journey in the United States, talking of their struggles and triumphs. "I use the character because I realize that when you are away from your country what you miss the most, apart from family, is the everyday things," says Santana, who has performed at Trinity Rep, the Villa Victoria Center for the Arts in Boston and at Dartmouth College.

While the immigrant experience is a large part of her work, she says, "I am interested in the things that connect us. Things like love, fear and loss, we will all experience these things regardless of race, gender or creed. It is my most sincere wish to bring people together through poetry."

In her daytime job, Santana — who lives in Providence with her husband, Daniel D'Orazio, and their daughters, Luna, 17, and Lía, 10 — finds the complete opposite of what she strives for as a poet.

An interpreter in the Rhode Island Supreme Court, she can only repeat what is said. "It can be emotionally taxing work," she says, "so I am glad to have an artistic outlet where I can recharge my energy and not be confined, ironically, by words."

With the Rhode Island Foundation award, Santana is focusing on two new works, a book of poetry and a work of fiction. "Domestic Poems" is a collection inspired by women who, like her, are balancing the creative along with marriage, children and a full-time job. The work of fiction, "Ena," is about Uli, a 13-year-old who is forced to move to New York from the Dominican Republic after the death of her mother.

To read some of Santana's work, go to sussysantana.com.

Julie Danho O'Connell

Julie Danho O'Connell's poetry, she says, is an attempt at understanding the world around her — the tangible and intangible.

"I've written about everything from the Lebanese civil war to Monica Lewinsky to buying a house," says O'Connell in an email interview. "I never start a poem knowing where it will end up, and it often takes me many revisions to come to any conclusions."

O'Connell, 38, grew up in Cumberland and began writing poetry after starting to read it in elementary school.

"I write poetry," she says, "because I hope to be part of the conversation started by the writers who inspire me. Poetry has a small audience, as many people feel like it is an inaccessible art form. ... But poems are meant to be enjoyed, not decoded. The best poems bridge our experiences with those of the writer rather than putting us at arm's length."

After graduating from Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania, she earned a master's of fine arts at Ohio State University, where she met her husband, fellow poet David O'Connell.

After returning to Rhode Island to get married, they decided to stay. They live in North Providence with their 5-year-old daughter. David has won several Rhode Island State Council on the Arts fellowships and his chapbook, "A Better Way to Fall," earned the Providence Athenaeum's Philbrick Poetry Award.

A self-professed "grammar geek," Julie published "Six Portraits," a chapbook that explores punctuation along with such topics as grief, art and typography. The book won the 2013 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition.

"In the chapbook, each of the six 'portraits' begins with a poem about a certain punctuation mark ...," says O'Connell, who has also earned several RISCA fellowships. "For example, the period poem is in a portrait with two other poems about metaphorical 'stops.' One is a friend's father's death, and the other is the death of John Lennon. The idea for the 'portraits' came because I write a lot about art, and some of the punctuation poems, such as the question mark, explore the design of the mark."

O'Connell, an editor at Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island in downtown Providence, rises at 5:30 each morning to squeeze in writing before work. The $25,000 fellowship from the Rhode Island Foundation will help her take time off to concentrate on her first full-length poetry manuscript.

The award will also fund a writing workshop with one of her favorite poets, Alan Shapiro, and she's planning trips to view artworks for a series of poems about art.

"The incredible generosity of the MacColl Johnson Fellowship sets it apart from almost any other award," she says. "It gives me the time and support to focus on my writing career in a way that never was possible before."

See some of O'Connell's work at juliedanho.weebly.com.

Susannah Strong

Susannah Strong's debut graphic novel, "Moth," is the story of twin sisters who are separated when a tragic fire in a circus tent kills their parents. Worse yet, the girls, through an accident, caused the fire. They must grow up apart, individually dealing with the loss and their fault in it.

"I am drawn to the peculiar and uncanny, both in literature and in the visual arts," says Strong, 47, of Exeter, who draws graphic novels and comics. "When not certain what to make of something, I enter a state of wonder and curiosity.

"Likewise, I hope to lead my readers into worlds that are both uncomfortable and strangely familiar. ... If my work inspires readers to wonder, to ask questions, and to reflect upon the human condition, I consider that the highest personal and professional success."

Strong, a native of Houston and a graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, took the long road to the job of graphic novelist.

In her 20s and 30s, Strong, who earned a master's of visual arts from the University of London's Goldsmiths College and won the Murray Tinkelman Illustration Award while getting an MFA at Hartford Art School, was a visual artist who worked on sculptural and installation pieces for museums, galleries and alternative display spaces. Her work included multimedia installations and even full-room presentations with sculptures, drawing, videos and digital sound.

"In the case of the rooms, I created solitary environments in which the viewer became the object, implicated in the meaning of the work through the act of participation," she writes in an email interview. "One of the enclosed rooms I built within a gallery space contained a six-foot-high rectangular trough of peat, topped with live sod. The effect upon opening the door and entering was one of walking into one's own grave."

But while enjoying her work, she tired of creating pieces that were only available for short periods, and only to those who came to check out the exhibit.

In her 30s, she started concentrating on work that was "more accessible," she says. While she extended her visual work deeper into the world of words, she realized narrative was always a strong part of her work. And while a visual artist, she wrote regularly, compiling as many "journals packed with writing as I have sketchbooks full of drawings."

Some of her favorite graphic novels are "V for Vendetta" by Alan Moore and David Lloyd, "The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch" by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, and Frans Masereel's "Passionate Journey," done in woodcut in 1919 and, she says, one of the earliest examples of contemporary graphic novels. Among comics and strips, she cites Winsor McCay's "Little Nemo in Slumberland," George Herriman's "Krazy Kat," and Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes."

With the Rhode Island Foundation fellowship, Strong is reducing her course load at Salve Regina University, where she is an assistant professor of art, as she finishes "Moth" and finds more time to send it around to publishers. She is also working on several short comics.

"... I am in the emergent stages of finding my voice in this medium," she says. "Fortunately, this is the nature of the fellowship's intention — to allow emerging creatives to develop and strengthen their work. ... I have the feeling that where I end up in this novel might not look anything like where I currently sit with it."

To view some of Strong's work, go to susannahstrong.com.