This morning,
PEN America released the 2021 Literary Awards Finalists. More than forty-five imprints and presses are featured on the list, with half of the titles coming from university and indie presses. Twenty books are from writers making their literary debuts, and half the titles among the open-genre awards are poetry collections. Chosen by a cohort of judges representing a wide range of disciplines, backgrounds, identities, and aesthetic lineages, these fifty-five Finalist books represent a humbling selection of the year’s finest examples of literary excellence.
The stories on the Finalists lists are about parents, grandparents, and grandchildren, about siblings and their rivalries. These writers share the lives of people who are nonbinary and people who are transgender; people of all ages with changing bodies; immigrants and citizens and people seeking refuge; a basketball legend; a young woman who plucks factory chickens smooth; a tugboat driver; and Phillis Wheatley, Ame
Credit: Tanya Rosen-Jones
Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including the volumes of poetry
Inquisition,
The Far Mosque, winner of Alice James Books’ New England/New York Award;
The Fortieth Day;
Bright Felon and
Wind Instrument. His novels include the recently published
The Secret Room: A String Quartet and among his books of essays are the hybrid memoir
Silver Road: Essays, Maps & Calligraphies and
Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice. He is also an accomplished translator (of Marguerite Duras, Sohrab Sepehri, Ananda Devi, Mahmoud Chokrollahi and others) and an editor of several anthologies and books of criticism. After a career in public policy and organizing, Ali taught at various colleges and universities, including Oberlin College, Davidson College, St. Mary’s College of California, and
December 23, 2020
Wesleyan University Press authors Hafizah Geter, Rae Armantrout, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers were recently longlisted for awards from PEN America.
Un-American, published by Wesleyan University Press, is longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award.
Hafizah Geter’s debut poetry collection,
Un-American, is longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. The PEN Open Book Award honors a work of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, or poetry written by an author of color. The award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.
Geter’s collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes linguistic, cultural, racial, familial of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist Black man, Geter charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships thro
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After months of relentless lobbying and fervent speculation, Gov. Gavin Newsom has chosen California’s next senator.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla will replace Vice President-elect Kamala Harris in the U.S. Senate, making him California’s first Latino senator.
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Newsom faced competing pressures to select either a Latino politician or a Black female politician for the role, with either choice potentially rectifying broader issues of representation: Latinos outnumber any other ethnic group in California, yet the state has never had a Latino senator. But without a Black woman chosen to succeed Harris, the number of Black women in the Senate would dwindle back to zero.
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON â While plagues have historically fostered every kind of lossâof freedom, of livelihood, of hope, of life itselfâthe isolation of grim eras such as the one we are now experiencing can also provoke introspection, fresh curiosity, and, with luck and mettle, singular creativity. Conjunctions:75, Dispatches from Solitude â the latest issue of the innovative literary magazine published by Bard College â gathers fiction, poetry, essays, and genre-bending work from writers far and wide who â despite the deficits of quarantine, self-isolation, and distancing â are closely bonded by a shared embrace of the written word and its ineffable powers of expression. Edited by novelist and Bard literature professor Bradford Morrow, Dispatches from Solitude features two previously unpublished songs by Sandra Cisneros, recipient of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature; a new short story by 2020 Bard Fiction Prize wi