Congratulations to all of our NER authors who have been recognized with awards so far this year, including Reginald Dwayne Betts, Thi Bui, Victoria Chang, Camille Dungy, Brad Felver, Rickey Laurentiis, James Longenbach, Valeria Luiselli, Molly Spencer, Brian Tierney, and Monica Youn. We are so proud of you and we continue to look forward to hearing about your next literary endeavors!
Brad Felver is the winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which is one of the most prestigious awards for a book-length collection of short stories or novellas. His manuscript, “The Dogs of Detroit,” is a collection of short stories, each of which focuses on grief and its many permutations, and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press this year. Felver’s essay “City of Glass” can be found in NER 39.1
Three NER authors received awards from the Poetry Society of America. The Society gives awards for single poems, collections, and manuscripts, and each award has its own criteria.
Victoria Chang was awarded the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award for her poetry collection, titled Obit. The Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award is awarded to outstanding manuscripts-in-progress of poetry. A selection of poems from the collection can be found on the Foundation’s website here. Poems from Chang’s Obit also appeared in NER 38.3.
The Lucille Medwick Memorial Award has been given to Molly Spencer for her poem “Interior with a Woman Peeling Oranges, Snapping Beans.“ The award was created by Maury Medwick in honor of his wife Lucille, and is awarded for an original poem in any form on a humanitarian theme. Two of Spencer’s poems were published in NER 38.4.
Brian Tierney has been awarded the George Bogin Memorial Award. The Award was established by the family and friends of George Bogin for a selection of four or five poems that use language in an original way to reflect the encounter of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and to take a stand against oppression in any of its forms. Tierney’s poem “All Stars Are Lights, Not All Lights Are Stars” is online on the Foundation’s website, and his poetry appears in NER 38.1.
Four NER Authors were named as finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The NBCC Award is awarded each March in six categories: fiction, general nonfiction, poetry, autobiography, biography, and criticism.
Thi Bui was a finalist in the autobiography category for her graphic novel The Best We Could Do, which explores her Vietnamese heritage and shares the stories of her parents’ lives. Bui’s illustrated memoir piece, “Blood and Rice,” appeared in NER 37.4.
Camille Dungy‘s Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, made the finals list in the criticism category. Guidebook to Relative Strangers details Dungy’s experiences of traveling cross country with her young daughter, and interplay between others’ perceptions of them as mother-and-child and as black women. Dungy’s work can be found in NER 36.2.
Valeria Luiselli was also named a finalist in the criticism category. Her work Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions provides stark contrast between the American dream and the reality of undocumented children living in the US. Luiselli’s work “Stuttering Cities” (translated by Christina MacSweeney) appeared in the 35.1 issue of NER.
James Longenbach was named a finalist for poetry. His collection of poems, titled Earthling, blends the meditations of a modern-day “earthling” with many different perspectives, exploring what it means to be an inhabitant of Earth and how we confront our own mortality. Longenbach’s writing has been published multiple times by NER, most recently in 32.1.
Rickey Laurentiis has been awarded the prestigious Whiting Award for poetry. The Whiting Awards, given annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, is based on early accomplishment and the promise of outstanding writing to come. Laurentiis’s debut book is titled Boy with Thorn: Poems, and his poem “Memory and Happiness” appeared in NER 36.2.
Two NER authors were awarded Guggenheim Fellowships for their poetry. Each year, roughly 175 Fellowships are awarded to individuals who demonstrate exceptional capabilities in productive scholarship, or exceptional creative ability in the arts.
Monica Youn is the author of three books: Blackacre, Ignatz, and Barter. Her work has also been published in numerous literary magazines, including Poetry, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Lana Turner, the Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. Her work appeared most recently in NER 37.1.
Reginald Dwayne Betts has published three collections of poetry: Near Burn and Burden: a collection of poems, Sahid Reads His Own Hand, and Bastards of the Reagan Era. His work can be found in NER 31.4, 34.1, and 35.3.
And lastly, James Magruder‘s new musical Head Over Heels will be premiering on Broadway this month. The musical is an adaption of Sir Philip Sidney’s well known play Arcadia and features a mash-up of the song catalog of the Go-Go’s. His story story “Matthew Aiken’s Vie Bohème” appeared in NER 32.3.