NER congratulates our authors Jamaal May and Safiya Sinclair for being among the nineteen writers who have been awarded Literature Awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters.

May is the recipient of the Benjamin H. Danks Award, a $20,000 prize given triennially to an exceptional young writer; Sinclair is the recipient of the Addison M. Metcalf Award, a $10,000 prize awarded to a young writer of fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry.

Writers will be honored in New York City at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in May.

Jamaal May was born in Detroit, Michigan. His first book, Hum, received the Beatrice Hawley Award, the American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, and an NAACP Image Award nomination. He has been awarded a Rose O’Neill Literary House Cave Canem Residency, the Kenyon Review Fellowship, and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Italy, among other awards and fellowships. His poems appear in such periodicals as NYTimes.com, New Republic, Believer, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry 2014. He co-edits the poetry section of Solstice and teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.

Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her first full-length collection, Cannibal, won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry (University of Nebraska Press, 2016). She is the recipient of a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Kenyon Review, the Nation, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in Poetry from the University of Virginia and is currently a PhD candidate in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.