G&A: The Contest Blog

On Wednesday, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the recipients of its 2016 writing fellowships. Grants of approximately $50,000 each were awarded to twenty-two poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers in the United States and Canada on the basis of past achievement and exceptional promise. 

The fellows in poetry are: Beth Bachmann of Nashville, Tennessee; Rick Barot of Tacoma, Washington; Jericho Brown of Decatur, Georgia; Stephen Burt of Belmont, Massachusetts; Cynthia Huntington of Post Mills, Vermont; Sally Keith of Washington, D.C.; James Kimbrell of Tallahassee, Florida; Deborah Landau of Brooklyn, New York; Ed Roberson of Chicago, Illinois; and Brian Turner of Orlando, Florida.

The fellows in fiction are: Jesse Ball of Chicago, Illinois; Jennifer Clement of New York, New York; Amity Gaige of West Hartford, Connecticut; Laila Lalami of Santa Monica, California; Jenny Offill of Red Hook, New York; Jess Row of New York, New York; René Steinke of Brooklyn, New York; and Melanie Rae Thon of Salt Lake City, Utah.

The fellows in nonfiction are: Adam Kirsch of New York, New York; Chris Kraus of Los Angeles, California; Amitava Kumar of Poughkeepsie, New York; Glenn Kurtz of New York, New York; Nick Laird of New York, New York; Paul Lisicky of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Amanda Petrusich of Brooklyn, New York; Robert Storr of New Haven, Connecticut; and Sarah Payne Stuart of Nobleboro, Maine.

Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, said of the 2016 class, “These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best…It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”

Established in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship program has granted more than $334 million in annual awards to more than 18,000 individuals. This year, a total of 175 fellowships, including three joint fellowships, were awarded to 178 writers, artists, and scholars. For more information about the program and fellows, visit gf.org.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation has announced James Hannaham as the winner of the 36th annual PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel Delicious Foods. The $15,000 award is given annually for a book of fiction by an American author published in the previous year.

Delicious Foods (Little, Brown), Hannaham’s second novel, tells the story of an African American boy who tries to save his mother—who struggles with drug addiction—from a farm where she is held captive. Hannaham, who is interested in experimentation in prose, wrote the novel from the perspective of the boy, the mother, and crack cocaine. Hannaham lives in New York City and teaches at the Pratt Institute.

“This exceptional novel is impressive for many reasons and speaks to the American experience today in a variety of ways, from the entrapment of perspective because of poverty and drug use to the heroic perseverance of character even after the worst of choices and atrocities,” says Sergio Troncoso, who judged this year’s prize along with fiction writers Abby Frucht and Molly McCloskey. “Delicious Foods is a standout work of fiction that will surely expand a reader’s empathy for the struggles of a variety of groups and individuals freeing themselves from modern enslavement.”

The finalists for the prize were Julie Iromuanya for Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press); Viet Thanh Nguyen for The Sympathizer (Grove Press); Elizabeth Tallent for Mendocino Fire (HarperCollins); and Luis Alberto Urrea for The Water Museum (Little, Brown). Each finalist will receive $5,000. The judges­ selected the finalists from nearly five hundred novels and story collections from 165 publishing houses.

Hannaham and the four finalists will be honored at an awards ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., on May 14. Recent winners of the prize include Atticus Lish for his novel, Preparation for the Next Life; Karen Joy Fowler for her novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves; and Benjamin Alire Sáenz for his story collection Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club.

The Asian American Writers Workshop (AAWW) has announced the ten recipients of its 2016 Margins and Open City Fellowships. The fellowships are given to emerging Asian and Asian American creative writers and journalists based in New York City. Fellows receive $2,500 to $5,000, publication in one of AAWW’s online publications, and career development.

The 2016 Margins Fellows are poet Jen Hyde, fiction writer Vt Hung, fiction writer and filmmaker Steven Tagle, and nonfiction writer Wei Tchou. The fellowships each include $5,000, publication opportunities in the Margins, a residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts, writing space at AAWW’s offices in New York City, and guidance and mentorship from writers and editors in the AAWW community.

The Spring 2016 Open City Fellows are nonfiction writers Jai Dulani, Rahimon Nasa, and Thanu Yakupitiyage. Each fellow receives $2,500, publication in Open City, and career development opportunities to “craft narratively driven creative nonfiction and reportage about issues that matter to the 1.6 million Asian immigrants who call the five boroughs home.” This year, AAWW also awarded three Spring 2016 Open City Language Justice Fellows to Liz Chow, Yichen Tu, and Rong Xiaoqing. The fellowships, which offer the same benefits as the Open City Fellowships, are given to Asian-language immigrant journalists. The inaugural fellows will spend six months developing stories from New York City’s Chinatowns and beyond. All three fellows are journalists who have covered New York City immigrant communities for Asian-language media outlets.

The Margins and Open City fellows were selected from a group of more than a hundred applicants by a panel of writers, AAWW board members, and former fellows. The Language Justice fellows were nominated by members of the AAWW community. Applications for the Fall 2016 Open City Fellowships will open in April; applications for the 2017 Margins Fellowships will open in July.

Established in 1991, the AAWW is devoted to advancing the creation and publication of Asian American writing. Read more about the AAWW, which celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary this year, in Arvin Temkar’s article “AAWW Continues the Conversation” in the Jan/Feb 2016 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Photos, top row from left: Jen Hyde (Patrick Delorey), Vt Hung (Diana Mai), Steven Tagle (Christopher Smith Photography), Wei Tchou. Middle: Jai Dulani, Rahimon Nasa, Thanu Yakupitiyage. Bottom: Liz Chow, Yichen Tu, Rong Xiaoqing

The Academy of American Poets has named Mai Der Vang the recipient of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award, the largest prize in the country for a debut poetry collection. Vang’s winning manuscript, Afterland, will be published in 2017 by Graywolf Press.

As part of the prize, Vang will also receive $5,000 and a six-week paid residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Italy, and her work will be featured on Poets.org as well as in American Poets, the Academy’s print periodical.

Award-winning poet Carolyn Forché selected Vang as this year’s winner. Of Vang’s manuscript Forché writes, “Afterland has haunted me. I keep returning to read these poems aloud, hearing in them a language at once atavistic, contemporary, and profoundly spiritual. Mai Der Vang confronts the Secret War in Laos, the flight of the Hmong people, and their survival as refugees. That a poet could absorb and transform these experiences in a single generation—incising the page with the personal and collective utterances of both the living and the dead, in luminous imagery and a surprising diction that turns both cathedral and widow into verbs, offering both land and body as swidden (slashed and burned)—is nothing short of astonishing. Here is deep attention, prismatic intelligence, and fearless truth.”

Vang, thirty-four, holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her poetry and essays have appeared in the Cincinnati Review, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere, and she coedited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heydey, 2011). A Kundiman fellow, Vang has also been awarded residencies from Hedgebrook, and is an editorial member of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. Vang resides in Fresno, California, where she teaches and works as a writing and creative consultant.

The annual Walt Whitman Award was established in 1975 to encourage the work of emerging poets. Previous winners include Suji Knock Kim, Eric Pankey, J. Michael Martinez, and Sjohnna McCray, whose 2015 winning manuscript, Rapture, will be published next month by Graywolf. 

The Whiting Foundation has announced the 2016 Whiting Awards winners, who were honored last night at a ceremony at the New York Historical Society in New York City. The annual award is one of the largest monetary prizes given to emerging poets and writers. Each winner receives $50,000.

This year's winners are LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Safiya Sinclair, Layli Long Soldier, and Ocean Vuong in poetry; Alice Sola Kim, Catherine Lacey, and Mitchell S. Jackson in fiction; Brian Blanchfield and J. D. Daniels in nonfiction; and Madeleine George in drama. Find out more about the winners at the Whiting Foundation website, and read excerpts from their work at the Paris Review.

Established by the Whiting Foundation in 1985, the Whiting Awards aim to “identify exceptional new writers who have yet to make their mark in the literary culture." More than $6.5 million has been awarded to over three hundred poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights since the award’s inception.

Previous winners have included David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, Tracy K. Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lydia Davis, Denis Johnson, Mary Karr, Michael Cunningham, Alice McDermott, Jorie Graham, Mark Doty, Ben Fountain, Tobias Wolff, Jonathan Franzen, Terrance Hayes, and more recently Adam Johnson, Elif Batuman, and Anthony Marra. Visit the Whiting Foundation website for a complete list of past winners.

No submissions are accepted to the award; a rotating group of anonymous nominators and judges, made up of writers, editors, agents, critics, professors, booksellers, and other literary professionals, are selected each year by the Whiting Foundation.

Top row, from left: LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, Madeleine George, Layli Long Soldier, Safiya Sinclair, J. D. Daniels, Mitchell S. Jackson. Bottom row: Alice Sola Kim, Catherine Lacey, Ocean Vuong, Brian Blanchfield.

Submissions are currently open for the 2016 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, given annually for a single poem. The winner will receive $1,000 and publication in Indiana Review. Camille Rankine will judge.

Using the online submission system, submit up to three poems totaling no more than eight pages with a $20 entry fee by April 1. The fee, which includes a one-year subscription to the review, must be mailed separately to Indiana Review, Ballantine Hall 529, 1020 East Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405. All entries are considered for publication. Visit the website for complete guidelines.

Judge Camille Rankine has written one poetry collection, Incorrect Merciful Impulses (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and is the assistant director of the MFA program at Manhattanville College. “Poetry can say all the hard things, all the things that you aren’t supposed to say in polite conversation,” says Rankine in a recent interview with Indiana Review. “I’m drawn to poems that have something to say—it can be something large or small, but I want to read a poem that feels like it needed to be written.” Rankine’s full interview is available on the journal’s website.

Eduardo C. Corral selected Caitlin Scarano as the winner of the 2015 prize for her poem “Between the Bloodhounds and My Shrinking Mouth.” Eileen Myles selected Cecilia Woloch as the winner of the 2014 prize for her poem “2006.”

Established in 1977, Indiana Review is published biannually and edited by graduate students at Indiana University. The journal publishes poetry, fiction, essays, and art.

Listen to Camille Rankine read from her debut collection as part of the Poets & Writers’ Page One podcast series below.

The winners of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Awards were announced last night in New York City. The winners include Ross Gay in poetry for Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press), Paul Beatty in fiction for The Sellout (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Maggie Nelson in criticism for The Argonauts (Graywolf Press), and Margo Jefferson in autobiography for Negroland (Pantheon).

Charlotte Gordon won in biography for Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House), and Sam Quinones won in nonfiction for Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury). Kirstin Valdez Quade won the John Leonard Prize—given for an outstanding first book in any genre—for her story collection, Night at the Fiestas (Norton). Carlos Lozada, an associate editor and nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post, won the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Wendell Berry, the author of eight novels, two story collections, twenty-eight books of poetry, and thirty-one books of nonfiction, received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

The finalists in poetry were Terrance Hayes for How to Be Drawn (Penguin), Ada Limón for Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions), Sinéad Morrissey for Parallax and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and the late Frank Stanford for What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford (Copper Canyon Press).

The fiction finalists were Lauren Groff for Fates and Furies (Riverhead), Valeria Luiselli for The Story of My Teeth (Coffee House Press), Anthony Marra for The Tsar of Love and Techno (Hogarth), and Ottessa Moshfegh for Eileen (Penguin Press).

The finalists in criticism were Ta-Nehisi Coates for Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau), Leo Damrosch for Eternity’s Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake (Yale University Press), Colm Tóibín for On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton University Press), and James Wood for The Nearest Thing to Life (Brandeis University Press).

The finalists in autobiography were Elizabeth Alexander for The Light of the World (Grand Central), Vivian Gornick for The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), George Hodgman for Bettyville (Viking), and Helen Macdonald for H Is for Hawk (Grove Press).

Established in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which are among the most prestigious prizes for literature, are given annually for books published in the previous year. A board of twenty-four working newspaper and magazine critics and editors nominates and selects the winners each year. The 2014 winners included Claudia Rankine in poetry, Marilynne Robinson in fiction, and Roz Chast in autobiography.

Photos from left to right: Ross Gay (Jim Krause), Paul Beatty, Maggie Nelson, and Margo Jefferson

At a ceremony Wednesday night in New York City, Adam Johnson was named the  winner of the 2016 Story Prize for his collection Fortune Smiles (Random House). The $20,000 award is given annually for a short story collection published during the previous year.

The two runners-up for the prize were Charles Baxter for There’s Something I Want You to Do (Pantheon) and Colum McCann for Thirteen Ways of Looking (Random House). Each finalist received $5,000. The Story Prize Spotlight Award—an additional prize of $1,000, given for a collection of exceptional merit—went to Adrian Tomine for his collection of graphic short stories, Killing and Dying (Drawn & Quarterly). During Wednesday night’s event, all three finalists read from and discussed their work on stage with prize director Larry Dark.

Last November Fortune Smiles took home the National Book Award, which makes Johnson the first author to win the Story Prize and the National Book Award for the same title. He is also now the first author to have won the Story Prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize, which he received in 2013 for his novel The Orphan Master’s Son. Johnson is also the author of the story collection Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a California Book Award, among other accolades. He lives in San Francisco and teaches creative writing at Stanford University.

Dark and Story Prize founder Julie Lindsey selected the three finalists from among a hundred books submitted in 2015, from sixty-four different publishers. A panel of three judges selected the winner: author and previous Story Prize–winner Anthony Doerr; Rita Meade, a librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library; and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz.

“Fortune Smiles is an electrically imaginative story collection that’s wrestling very hard with the world we’re living in right now,” the judges said. “Johnson writes like Rembrandt painted, richly and specifically, with an inclination toward self-portrait and a gift for making it seem like a whole world carries on not only within but beyond each of these small canvasses.”

Established in 2004 to honor collections of short fiction and to attract more attention to the form, the Story Prize boasts the largest first-prize amount of any fiction award in the United States. Previous winners include Elizabeth McCracken, George Saunders, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Steven Millhauser.

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

The recipients of the 2016 Windham Campbell Prizes for Literature have been announced. Administered by Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the annual awards are given to English-language writers of fiction, nonfiction, and drama for outstanding literary achievement or great potential. Each writer receives $150,000.

The winners in fiction are Tessa Hadley (U.K.), C. E. Morgan (U.S.), and Jerry Pinto (India); the winners in nonfiction are Hilton Als (U.S.), Stanley Crouch (U.S.), and Helen Garner (Australia); and the winners in drama are Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (U.S.), Hannah Moscovitch (Canada), and Abbie Spallen (Ireland).

The Windham Campbell Prizes were established in 2013 by Donald Windham and Sandy M. Campbell to “call attention to literary achievement and provide writers with the opportunity to focus on their work independent of financial concerns.” The prizes are open to writers from anywhere in the world at all stages of their careers. There is no application process for the prize; the awards are made by a group of nominators, a three-member jury in each category, and a nine-member selection committee. Past winners have included Teju Cole, Geoff Dyer, John Jeremiah Sullivan, James Salter, and Naomi Wallace. The 2017 prizes will expand to include a poetry category.

The winners will receive their prizes during an international literary festival at Yale in September celebrating their work. All festival events are free and open to the public. For more information about the prizes and the 2016 winners, visit the Windham Campbell Prizes website.

Below, watch 2016 nonfiction winner Hilton Als deliver the keynote lecture at last year's Windham Campbell Prizes Festival.

Hilton Als' 2015 Windham-Campbell Lecture from Windham Campbell Prizes on Vimeo.

Photos: C. E. Morgan, Stanley Crouch, Hilton Als.

The University of Georgia Press has announced that poet Christopher Salerno of Caldwell, New Jersey, has won the inaugural Georgia Poetry Prize for his collection Sun & Urn. Salerno will receive a cash award of $1,000 and publication by the University of Georgia Press in February 2017. He will also be invited to read his work at the prize’s sponsoring institutions—the University of Georgia, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State University—and will receive an additional $1,000, as well as travel expenses, for each reading.
Christopher Salerno is the author of three previous poetry collections: Whirligig (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2006); Minimum Heroic (Mississippi Review Press, 2010), which won the 2011 Mississippi Review Award; and ATM (Georgetown Review Press, 2014), which was selected by poet D. A. Powell for the 2014 Georgetown Review Poetry Prize. Salerno currently serves as associate professor in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University in New Jersey.

Thomas Lux, the final judge of this year’s award, said of Salerno’s manuscript, “Christopher Salerno’s Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice!”

The Georgia Poetry Prize is a national competition established in 2015 to celebrate poetic excellence. The prize is to be administered annually; submissions for next year’s prize will be accepted from October 1 to November 30. Visit the website for submission guidelines and more information.