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