PEN America Literary Awards PEN/Magid Award for Editing

The PEN/Nora Magid Award for Magazine Editing, established in 1993, honors a magazine editor whose high literary standards and taste have, throughout his or her career, contributed significantly to the excellence of the publication he or she edits. Candidates for this biennial award include current editors-in-chief, literary editors, and “back-of-the-book” editors of serious general interest magazines, book reviews, or literary reviews and quarterlies, whose intellectual discernment and wide range of interests recall the late PEN America Member Nora Magid. The winning nominee will receive an award of $2,500.

Joel Whitney and Michael Archer

Guernica: A Magazine of Art and Politics

MICHAEL ARCHER & JOEL WHITNEY, GUERNICA, 2017 Winners

Judges: Michael Dumanis, Caitlin McKenna, David L. Ulin

From the judges’ citation: “Thirteen years ago, Joel Whitney and Michael Archer co-founded Guernica, a start-up enterprise that recognized the inherent interconnectedness of literature and politics, dedicating itself to bringing the best contemporary world fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and the most vital essays on American and global politics, together in an online space. The magazine emerged in part as a response to the policies of then-President George W. Bush, and had, from its inception, an outward-looking international perspective, a humanitarian ethos, and a commitment to social justice, as well as a discerning yet broad aesthetic sensibility. Now reaching over 1.4 million individual readers, with 3.75 million page views this past year, Guernica publishes work that is serious, ambitious, diverse, engaging, and literary. As one of the most distinctive and consistent online publications today, this is a magazine of the highest quality.?

 

History

Previous Winners

(This award is offered every other year, in odd-numbered years.)

1993  Peter Stitt, Gettysburg Review

1995  Herbert Leibowitz, Parnassus

1997  Wendy Lesser, The Threepenny Review

1999  Stan Lindberg, Georgia Review

2001  Askold Melnyczuk, AGNI

2003  Robert Fogarty, Antioch Review

2005  Willard Spiegelman, Southwest Review

2007  Bradford Morrow, Conjunctions

2009  Hannah Tinti, One Story

2011  Brigid Hughes, A Public Space

2013  Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, Mother Jones

2015  Rob Spillman, Tin House

2017  Michael Archer & Joel Whitney, Guernica

 

 

Selection Process

Candidates can only be nominated by a Professional Member of PEN America who is in good standing and whose admiration of the candidate’s work prompts him or her to articulate, in some detail, the ways in which the editor has made a personal mark upon the literary quality of the publication. All nominations may be supplemented by nominations from the judges themselves.

Please nominate editors here.