Presented by Commonwealth Society, the awards “strive to annually recognize the state’s best writers and illuminate the wealth and diversity of California-based literature.” Kearney is a finalist in poetry, for his collection Buck Studies.

The $10,000 prize, awarded by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honors “a young writer of fiction, nonfiction, drama, or poetry.”

The art magazine praises Long Soldier’s use of language, writing that, in her collection, language becomes "material, as living as grass.”

The New York Times recaps a Symphony Space panel on Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son with writers Jenny Offill, Chuck Palahniuk, and Whiting winners Victor LaValle and Michael Cunningham. The four discusses the uniqueness of Johnson’s work and why, as Cunningham says, “so many people want to write this book over again.”

The finalists, presented by Publishing Triangle, represent “the very best in LGBT writing for calendar year 2016.” Williams is nominated for his collection Thief in the Interior. 

Hutchinson talks to fellow writer Teju Cole about why God is the strongest influence on his work and why writing poetry is “attempting to do the work of immortality.”

In her Paris Review column on animals, Passarello profiles a creature with orange teeth and a talent for family planning. 

In The New York Review of Books, Pinckney reviews documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which he calls “a tone poem to a freedom movement not yet finished.” Pinckney explores why film’s footage of Baldwin, although intimate, can't explain Baldwin’s relationship with Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X. 

Brian Blanchfield is nominated for Gay Memoir/Biography, Leopoldine Core for Bisexual Fiction, Darryl Pinckney for Gay Fiction, and Ocean Vuong is nominated for Gay Poetry. The awards celebrate achievement in LGBTQ literature.

Chosen as one of the 100 residents shaping Brooklyn, Kim discusses her proudest achievement and why we need to “defamiliarize whiteness.”