With the Chicago Public Library and the American Writers Museum serving as co-presenters, the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame is presenting the Fuller Award to Sandra Cisneros for her lifetime contribution to literature. A virtual ceremony, with Chicago poet Carlos Cumpian as master of ceremonies, will take place on Saturday, March 13, at 7 p.m. Central. Cisneros will participate in a conversation with Booklist editor Donna Seaman, and there will be short tributes by local artists and an audience Q&A. The event is free and open to the public, but attendees must register.
The Chicago Literary Hall of Fame said: "Cisneros, a world-famous novelist, short story writer, poet, essayist, performer, activist, and artist first achieved acclaim with her international bestselling novel, The House on Mango Street. Published in 1984, the novel has since sold over six million copies, has been translated into 20 languages, and, according to the author's website is 'taught everywhere from inner-city grade schools to universities.' Set in Chicago, where she was born and raised, The House on Mango Street won the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award in 1985."
She has also published seven books, including poetry, fiction, essays and memoir. She has been awarded NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, the Texas Medal of the Arts, a MacArthur Fellowship, Chicago's Fifth Star Award, the PEN Center USA Literary Award, the Fairfax Prize, the Ford Foundation Art of Change Fellowship, and the PEN/Nabokov Award for International Literature. In addition, she was recognized among the Frederick Douglas 200, and President Obama awarded her the National Medal for the Arts in 2016.
---
The 2020-21 winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, sponsored by Milkweed Editions and Copper Nickel, is Brian Tierney for his poetry collection Rise and Float. He receives $2,000, and Milkweed will publish the book in February 2022.
Judge Randall Mann said, "In these poems of turnpikes, water, and migraine light, filled with grief and life, the poet tells us it's all right that 'we don't love / living.' Here, precision is a form of metaphor, language a facet of experience; the poet writes with a kind of allusive purity and vulnerability--'each thought a texture'--that I find moving. Rise and Float is that rare thing, a book of one striking poem after another. If I could write something as tender and nearly perfect as 'You're the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With'--a lightning strike, Randall Jarrell would call it--then I might give up writing."
Tierney's poetry and prose have appeared in or are forthcoming in Paris Review, AGNI, Kenyon Review, NER, The Adroit Journal, and others. A graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, he is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford and winner of the Poetry Society of America's 2018 George Bogin Memorial Award. He teaches poetry at the Writing Salon.