Whiting Award Winners

Literary Hub features an excerpt from Adjmi's new memoir about the importance of his mother's influence. "I was frozen solid in the bucket seat of my mother’s Impala," it begins. "It was summer, a Wednesday afternoon in the year 1979, and I was eight years old."

The Tribune writes that David Adjmi's memoir "touches upon something deep and complex in the human condition."

In Zora magazine, the writers discuss  what it means to learn about your ancestors "with all of their complications," online Blackness, and more.

For the fiction podcast, Wray imagines what the border barrier will look like long after Trump — what will be standing, whom it will protect, how much it will matter.

"I think," Adjmi muses, "loneliness and alienation are really—I hate to say this—a kind of sustenance for artists and writers" in a new interview about his memoir, Lot Six.

On Cave Canem's blog, Kearney shares an open letter about George Floyd and the current world moment. "I would like to invite more white people," he writes, "to stop preferring that we keep producing new work when it’s they who have work to do."

In a piece about her daughter's birth for Romper, Greenidge wonders, "In that hospital room, back in the land of emotional peaks and valleys, I kept checking, over and over again: would my daughter be born on a good day?".

The new play by Rajiv Joseph, a mystery from a series of letters between strangers, friends, daughters, and lovers, is set to appear on stage next year.

The Review praises Brown's depiction of the body, and writes that "with [Brown]s] extraordinary poems and new forms, we might learn to heal our own damaged histories and selves, to make our own new myths, and to bring our whole person to the world."

The Cut's new series features advice for fledgling writers from authors including Sigrid Nunez and Alexander Chee, who advises, "I have always asked my students to focus on the stories only they can tell."

In her introduction to the section (which features new work by fellow Whiting Award winner Diannely Antigua), Aber writes that during the current challenging state of the world, "poetry offers shelter, by shaping language to hold us."

Mehta is interviewed on Reverberation Radio's "Quarantine Tapes" series about why, after the pandemic, the world needs more migration, not less.

The Times writes that, in his latest book, Mehta makes a compelling case for wealthy countries taking in migrants as reparation for damage done to their homelands.

The journalist recommends Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi's latest novel in an interview with the Bagri Foundation.

In a new poem on Poets.org, Jackson reflects "Show me your grin in the middle of winter./ In the eighties we did the wop; you, too, have your dances. It is like stealing light from a flash in the sky."

Las Comrades selects Díaz's memoir as one of their titles that will "thrill, entertain and inspire readers of all ages."

In a new poem for The New Republic, Levin writes, "Trying the long view—in which years breathe/ and the Great Wheel always turns, but/ so much damage done as ash and seed/ change places, as they always do—was that/ still true?".

Jackson  discusses Jorge Luis Borges’ influence on his new book's opening poem, reads from his collection The Absurd Man, and more.

Adjmi discusses abandoning and then reclaiming his past on his own terms in his new memoir, Lot Six, about queer identity and growing up in New York's Syrian Jewish Community.

In a new interview, Jackson muses, "I’ve found the writing of a poem is a kind of plunging, a willful dive below the surface of who I am, that field of mind, feeling, and memories."

Jackson is included among fellow authors Eula Biss, Natasha Trethewey, and more on Newcity 's list of 50 notable Chicago writers.

Books by Terrance Hayes, ZZ Packer, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Tracy K. Smith, Stephanie Powell Watts, Mitchell S. Jackson, Jericho Brown, Jia Tolentino, and Colson Whitehead are on the New York Public Library list of summer staff recommendations.

Grise will spend the three-year residency developing new works with the local community, working alongside a cohort of Dallas-based women of color to interrogate questions of land, autonomy, and the tools necessary to “build and sustain healthy and vibrant communities.”

Books by Lysley Tenorio, Catherine Lacey, Yiyun Li, Randall Kenan, Sigrid Nunez, and Sarah Shun-lien Bynum are featured in The Millions most anticipated book list for the second half of 2020.