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From these finalists for the PEN America Literary Awards, winners will be announced on April 8 and receive a total of more than US$380,000.
Dining tents in New York City’s Bryant Park, February 4. Image – iStockphoto: Massimo Giachetti
From 1,850 Submissions, 55 Finalists
A total of 55 titles in 11 categories have been named today (February 10) as finalists in the 2021 PEN America Literary Awards. They now are in contention for an aggregate purse of more than US$380,000. PEN America, of course, is the US affiliate chapter of PEN International.
An important and notably serious program among world publishing’s myriad awards programs each year, this series is also at times confusing because its sponsor-named categories vary widely in their nature and prize money. Some awards are funded for biennial presentation, rather than yearly.
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
February 8, 2021
Three titles affiliated with Wesleyan were nominated for the 2021 NAACP Images Awards in the Outstanding Literary Work Poetry category.
According to the NAACP, Image Awards celebrate “the outstanding achievements and performances of people of color in the arts and those who promote social justice through their creative work.”
Among the five nominees is
The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers; and
Un-American (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) by Hafizah Geter.
The collections by Murillo, Jeffers, and Geter also are 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.
Photo courtesy of Brooke Matson.
Brooke Matson is a Spokane-based poet and book artist whose latest collection, In Accelerated Silence
, explores the intersections of Big Science (think astrophysics) and Big Feeling (think grief and resilience). Both philosophical and grounded in the elements and the body, these poems read like missives from a starry night, when the body feels alive and the mind contemplative.
Hum by Jamaal May: Maybe because I read it on my first writing residency, May’s first full collection showcases his talent for word choice, rhythm, and creativity on the page. You can almost feel him pushing the boundaries of each poem in terms of structure, perspective, imagery, or all of them at once. The word choice is so spot-on that many of the poems take on a texture or resonant quality (as the title of the book implies). Needless to say, these poems inspired me to experiment during my residency and I still return to the poems often. Some have become downright impr