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The Beyond Margins Awards were created by PEN American
Center's Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic
diversity within the literary and publishing communities. Each year the Awards recognize booklength writings
by authors of color, published in the United States during the current
calendar year.
Please click here for more information on this award.
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2005 AWARDEES
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Presented by Elizabeth Nunez |
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Faith Adiele
Faith Adiele's Meeting
Faith tells a beautiful tale of time and transformation in a Thai forest
temple, from struggling college student to emergent Buddhist nun. Adiele engages
the reader with multiple narratives: her course of spiritual discovery; her
memories of conflicts negotiated for so many years, as a child of an African
father and a mother of Scandinavian heritage; her understanding of the
cultural, racial, and gender issues that surround her act of seeking faith.
Adiele is a graduate of Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
She is assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
She has been published in Ploughshares, Transition: An International Journal, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Adiele’s search for identity is featured in the PBS documentary The Journey Home. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang's novel Inheritance presents, with clarity and skill, the complexities and hardships of women's lives in the tumult of 20th-century China. The
narrator, Hong, tells how her mother and aunt struggled for decades to honor
their childhood pact never to abandon one another, despite poverty, war,
political upheaval—and love for the same man. Through their story, she gives
witness to the sufferings of three generations of women. The overall effect is of an epic drawn in
fine, personal, and affecting detail.
Chang is the author of Hunger: A Novella and Stories, which was a
finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and winner of
several other prizes, including the California Book Award and the
Southern Review Prize. Her fiction has been published in the
Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, and The Best American Short
Stories. She has received fellowships from Princeton University,
the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment
for the Arts. At the end of 2005, Chang will become Director of
the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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2004 AWARDEES
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Laila Halaby (novel, West of the River Jordan) was born in Lebanon to a Jordanian father and American mother. In addition to publishing West of the Jordan,
she has published poems, short stories, and children’s fiction in
anthologies and literary journals. Her education includes a B.A. in
Italian and Arabic (Washington University), a Fulbright scholarship to
Jordan, an M.A. in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (UCLA) and an
M.A. in School Counseling (Loyola Marymount University). She lives with
her family in Tucson, Arizona.
Suki Kim (novel, The Interpreter) was born and raised in South Korea and came to New York at the age of 13. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Newsweek. She is a graduate of Barnard College and lives in New York. The Interpreter is her debut novel.
Nasdijj (memoir, The Boy and the Dog are Sleeping)
was born in the American Southwest in 1950. The son of a Navajo woman,
he spent his childhood in part on a reservation and in part in migrant
camps around the country. He has been writing for more than two
decades, making ends meet by reporting for small-town papers, teaching
and doing migrant labor. He is the author of the critically acclaimed
memoir The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams, which was a New York Times Notable Book, and winner of the Salon Book Award; his new memoir, Geronimo’s Bones: A Memoir of My Brother and Me, has been released to acclaim. He is based in Chapel Hill, NC, but travels to reservation territories on a regular basis.
Willie Perdomo (poetry, Smoking Lovely) is the author of Smoking Lovely, Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, Postcards of El Barrio,
and Visiting Langston, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for
Children. His work has been included in the anthologies
Metropolis Found, The Harlem Reader, Poems of New York, and Bum Rush
the Page: A Def Poetry Jam. His work has appeared in The New York
Times Magazine, Bomb, Russell Simmons’ One World Magazine, and PEN
America: A Journal for Writers and Readers. He has been featured on
several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The
United States of Poetry as well as HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and BET’s Hughes’ Dream Harlem. Perdomo is based in New York.
April Reynolds (novel, Knee Deep in Wonder)
teaches literature and
creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in New York. Her
short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, among them
Mending the World and The Heretics Bible. Knee-Deep in Wonder,
her first novel, received a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright
Foundation Award for unpublished work. She lives in Queens, New
York. |
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Raquel Cepeda
Raquel Cepeda’s And It
Don’t Stop is a testament to the lasting power of hip-hop music and
culture. With brief, effective essays, Cepeda ties together articles from a
number of journalists—including Hilton Als, Dream Hampton, David Kamp, Sally
Banes, Danyel Smith and Nelson George—who represent a host of interests and
perspectives. The resulting anthology shows, with energy and intelligence, how
hip-hop has established itself and impacted the greater arts culture in the
United States (and abroad).
Cepeda is a journalist who has contributed to MTV News, The Village Voice, The Source, Vibe, Essence, Jalouse, and other publications. She was editor-in-chief of Russell Simmons’s controversial Oneworld magazine. She is currently working on a documentary on the blood diamond trade in Sierra Leone.
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Lolita Hernandez
Buttery pound cakes at an oil-pan fitting station, birds
chirping in the rafters, floral-patterned tiles at a strike meeting: Autopsy of an Engine shakes up readers'
expectations of what may be experienced "on the line” at a Cadillac plant. With striking, unorthodox images, Lolita
Hernandez's short stories celebrate the variety and richness of life to be
experienced even in a dying factory.
Hernandez is a Detroit
native. Her writing is greatly
influenced by the rhythms of her Trinidad and St. Vincent family, and is
tempered by over thirty years as a UAW worker, 21 of them at the
Cadillac Plant in Detroit. A deeply committed labor activist, Hernandez
travels nationwide on behalf of her union. |
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Ishle Yi Park
In poetry and prose, Ishle Yi Park captures the pain and perseverance
of the community in which she lives and works. The Temperature of This Water captures the tensions of her family,
beleaguered Korean immigrants and their children, as they negotiate racism,
overwork, disappointment, and still-held dreams within a larger drama of
immigrant striving in New York City. Park draws painful yet beautiful tableaux
with spare, nuanced language and a true rebel's vision.
Park is a Korean American was born in New York in 1977. A recipient of a fiction grant from the New
York Foundation for the Arts, her work has appeared in numerous publications,
including New American Writing, Beacon Best Writers of All Colors 2001,
and The Best American Poetry of 2003. Ishle has performed in the United States, Cuba,
and Korea, and she was a
featured poet on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. |
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2002 AWARDEES
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Meena Alexander (Illiterate Heart) was born in Allahabad, India, and has published numerous books, including the novels, Manhattan Music and Nampally Road; a book of poems and essays, The Shock of Arrival, and two volumes of poetry, River and Bridge and Illiterate Heart. Her memoir Fault Lines was chosen as one of Publisher’s Weekly’s
“Best Books of 1993.” The Royal Festival Hall in London commissioned a
poem by her on New York for Poetry International 2002. Alexander is a
Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate
Center at the City University of New York. She lives in New York
City.
Luis Francia (Eye of the Fish) is a poet, journalist and author of several books, including Eye of the Fish, The Arctic Archipelago and Other Poems, and a collection of essays, Memories of Overdevelopment. He is also the editor of several anthologies including Flippin’: Filipinos on America. He writes for The Village Voice and teaches at New York University. Born and raised in Manila, Francia now lives in Queens, New York.
Joy Harjo (A Map to the Next World)
is a poet, essayist, teacher, and saxophonist. She lives in both
Honolulu and Los Angeles and is a member of the Muskogee Tribe. She has
published several books, the latest being How We Became Human; her award-winning books of poetry include She Has Some Horses, In Mad Love and War, and The Woman Who Fell from the Sky. She co-edited Reinventing the Enemy’s Language: Contemporary Native Women Writers of North America. Harjo received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.
Victor D. Lavalle was born and
raised in Queens, New York, graduated from Cornell University with a
degree in English and received his MFA in fiction from Columbia
University. LaValle has been a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work
Center in Provincetown, MA, and received a Whiting Award for Fiction in
2004. He is the author of the short-story collection, Slapboxing with Jesus; his novel The Ecstatic
was finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Prize in 2003. His home is Oakland,
California, where he teaches fiction and creative writing at Mills
College.
Nelly Rosario was born in the
Dominican Republic and came to New York three months later. She has
received numerous awards, including a 1999 Barbara Deming Memorial Fund
Fellowship, the Bronx Writers’ Center Van Lier Literary Fellowship for
1999-2000, two National Arts Club Writing Fellowships, and the 1997
Hurston/Wright Award in Fiction. The Village Voice Literary Supplement has chosen her as a “writer on the verge” for 2001. Rosario is published in the anthology Becoming American. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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