Youngstown-born poet Ross Gay won the 2021 Jean Stein Book Award and its $75,000 cash prize.
Gay, who moved to the Philadelphia area at a young age, won the award for “Be Holding, A Poem,” which was published in 2020 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. It is described as a book-length poem and homage to basketball legend Julius Erving of the Philadelphia 76ers. It weaves in cultural and historical references, zooming in for a close look at Erving and back out to all of the forces that made the basketball legend possible.
Gay is a professor at Indiana University and returned to Youngstown two years ago as a guest of the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts.
The annual presentation of PEN America’s literary awards and career achievement honors was produced digitally for a second year.
A collage of some 55 finalists in the PEN America 2021 Literary Awards program. Image: PEN America
Nossel: ‘This Year of Tumult and Torment’
In our previews of the PEN America Literary Award finalists and the program’s Career Achievement Prize recipients,
Publishing Perspectives readers looked at one of the more complex annual presentations of a broad range of disparate awards.
Funded by many generous donors and presented on varying schedules, the program carries a combined value of more than US$380,000 in prize money and these awards carry the luster of PEN’s humanitarian stance when conferred on an author’s work.
Gay, Wang, Ehrenreich, Hartman Win at 2021 PEN Lit Awards By Calvin Reid | Apr 08, 2021
The PEN Literary Awards, presented this year in a virtual ceremony, awarded poet Ross Gay the $75,000 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for
Be Holding: A Poem (University of Pittsburgh), a book-length lyrical tribute to the great basketball player Julius Erving and much more. Michael X. Wang’s
Further News of Defeat: Stories won the $25,000 PEN/Bingham Short Story Prize, and Barbara Ehrenreich won the $15,000 PEN/Essay Award for her career-spanning collection
In addition, Saidiya Hartman was awarded the $10,000 PEN/Galbraith Nonfiction Award for
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, a groundbreaking history of radical queer black women (Norton). Jonathan Slaght won the $10,000 PEN/Wilson Science Writing Award for