Edwidge Danticat won the 2023 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, which recognizes writers "who have demonstrated exceptional achievement in the short story form." She will be honored December 1 at the annual PEN/Malamud Award Ceremony, held in partnership with American University.
"Edwidge Danticat is a once-in-a-generation kind of writer, one who changes the landscape of fiction by crafting stories that exalt human experience into the realm of the mythic," said Dolen Perkins-Valdez, PEN/Malamud Award committee chair. "It's impossible to read Danticat's exquisitely crafted stories and not walk away transformed. Lili. Lamort. Princesse. Elsie. Anika. They will not be forgotten! Danticat's stories are a gift to us all."
Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; The Farming of Bones; and The Dew Breaker, a 2005 PEN/Faulkner finalist. She is also the editor of The Butterfly's Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States; The Beacon Best of 2000; and Haiti Noir, Haiti Noir 2. She has written seven books for young adults and children, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance, and a collection of essays, Create Dangerously. Her most recent book, Everything Inside: Stories, was a 2020 winner of the Story Prize and the National Books Critics Circle Fiction Prize. She is also the author of an earlier collection of stories, Krik? Krak!.
Danticat said: "I am deeply honored to receive the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, named for such a virtuoso of the craft. In its conciseness and immediacy, the short story offers a unique way of addressing the complex emotions and realities that consume and haunt me and bring me joy. Many of my short stories pay homage to the oral tradition I was steeped in as a child in Haiti and as an immigrant in the United States. The short story has also been a unique space for me to experiment, explore, and grow as a storyteller, which makes this award even more gratifying."
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Concentrate by Courtney Faye Taylor (Graywolf Press) has won the 2023 Four Quartets Prize, sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America and awarded to "a unified and complete sequence of poems" published in the U.S.
Finalists were "The Sickness & the World Soul" by Brenda Hillman, from her collection In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan University Press), and Madness by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué (Nightboat).
Taylor receives $21,000, and the two finalists receive $1,000.
Judges called Concentrate "not only an elegy to Latasha Harlins, it is a lyrical study of Black womanhood. From the opening line: 'So far, my sentence as a Black woman has been hard to hone, homed in sore white pith,' we are presented with a statement of poetics as well as a vision of existential struggle. Latasha Harlins is more than a ghost here, she is a sister, muse, and doppelganger to the poet. The traditional first-person voice of a debut collection recedes as Taylor allows striking textual and visual experimentation to express and implicate. In many ways, this imaginative debut presents a lyrical documentary-style poetics, where the poet is detective and witness, poems as an accumulating series of lyric takes. Concentrate becomes both archivist's field guide and an artist's scrapbook; it becomes a bricolage of poetic invention remixing Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts's Harlem Is Nowhere and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. Courtney Faye Taylor's formal innovations would make this a groundbreaking debut whatever the subject. At the same time, the poet and Harlins feel mutually present in superb narrative poems and in striking mixed-media portraits of Black women. Taylor's ingenuity is anchored in empathy. Saidiya Hartman said, 'Care is the antidote to violence.' Concentrate is a work of brilliant rigorous care. It is one of the most daringly crafted and emotionally urgent books to emerge in recent years."
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Dianne Dugaw has won the 2023 Nicholas Schaffner Award for Music in Literature, which Schaffner Press will publish in 2024. The award, which goes to "a work of fiction, nonfiction or poetry that deals in some way with the subject of music (of any genre and period) and its influence," honors Nicholas Schaffner, a poet, musician, biographer, and music critic, and brother of Schaffner Press publisher Timothy Schaffner.
Publisher Tim Schaffner said, "In this beautifully written memoir, Dugaw draws the reader into the unseen yet vibrant world of a convent and her early years as a novice nun, set against the backdrop of mid-'60s San Francisco. With a finely tuned ear for both language and music from her own classical training, she arrives with a banjo to sing hymns at a prison work camp, and plays pop tunes like 'Hang on Sloopy' on the church organ."
Dugaw is professor of English and folklore at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The author of many scholarly works, this is her first non-academic book. In addition, she has recorded two CDs and is an expert on the art of the ballad.
This year's runners-up are A Deeper and Steeper Slope & Slant, a story collection by John Tait, and What Light Cannot Repair, a poetry collection by David Floyd.