The 2019 PEN America Literary Awards Winners

PEN/Jean Stein Book Award ($75,000)

To the author of a book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, and that has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence. JUDGES: Jennifer Clement, Matthew Desmond, Natalie Diaz, Brenda Shaughnessy, Charles Yu

Friday Black, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Mariner Books)
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From the judges’ citation: “In this brilliant debut collection of short stories, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah brings a new voice to old, vexing issues that continue to haunt American life: violence, racism, consumer lust, and more. The stories that form Friday Black combine the real and surreal, the concrete and the mythological, with such awful beauty and power that readers cannot but help question the sincerity of their convictions. Adjei-Brenyah twists the 2015 Charleston church massacre into a horror story of a different order, and the shocking result makes us question why we aren’t shocked more often. The 2012 slaying of Trayvon Martin forms the basis of another story, one in which murderous rage against black men is transformed into absurd entertainment, making us realize the terrible absurdity of white masculine fear. Adjei-Brenyah displays a cool control over his prose and dialogue while allowing his imagination to abandon constraints and conventions, exploring genetic enhancement, frenzied retail work, and soft friendships. At turns horrifying and funny, tender and savage, these stories stick with you, probing the American psyche and persistently asking more of us.”

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection ($25,000)

To an author whose debut collection of short stories published in 2018 represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise. JUDGES: Chris Abani, Frances Hwang, Gary Lutz

Bring Out the Dog, Will Mackin (Random House)
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From the judges’ citation: “When, in his story ‘The Fire Truck,’ Will Mackin describes a man’s whistling as ‘a sound that seemed to penetrate everything and pull it slightly apart,’ he could easily be describing the harrowed poetry of sublimely wracking exactitudes in which he has released these wildly original clarion bursts of storytelling art. Mackin’s fiction situates the reader in the headspace of an elite soldier who records the realities and irrealities of contemporary warfare, as well as the most heartless and heartful eruptions of human nature on both sides, with an audacious, infrared clarity. Bring Out the Dog is the debut of a visionary and a virtuoso.”

PEN Open Book Award ($5,000)

To an exceptional book-length work of any genre by an author of color, published in the United States in 2018. JUDGES: Hanif Abdurraqib, Cristina Arreola, Richie Narvaez, Kevin Nguyen, Elissa Washuta, Sunil Yapa

Heads of the Colored People, Nafissa Thompson-Spires (Atria)
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From the judges’ citation: “Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s Heads of the Colored People is an original and thrilling debut short story collection that deftly explores race as both foundational and ancillary in the lives of bickering school moms and melancholic teenagers, weaving together stories of Black upper middle class lives in contemporary America. A book this smart, funny, sly, charming, and devastating is a gift. Both of the moment and utterly timeless, these stories and the ‘heads’ they inhabit do the necessary and thrilling work of the best literature: They expand the understanding of what it means to be a human and alive in this moment.”

PEN Translation Prize ($3,000)

For a book-length translation of prose from any language into English published in 2018. JUDGES: Ezra Fitz, Barbara Harshav, Vincent Kling, Marian Schwartz, Ron Slate

Love, Hanne Ørstavik (Archipelago Books)
Translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken
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From the judges’ citation: “The judges are proud to honor Martin Aitken for his luminous translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s haunting novel Love, which follows the distant, orbiting lives of a mother and son like a telescope through one cold winter’s night. In a mere 125 pages, Ørstavik distills a tremendous sense of emptiness, loneliness, and yearning from Vibeke and her son Jon, and in Aitken’s elegant translation, the prose crackles like the icy environs of Norway itself. Ørstavik’s narrative shifts without warning between the voices and visions of her two protagonists, and the finesse of Aitken’s focus allows these transitions to take place with equal parts artistry and subtlety. What we have, in the end, with Love, is an extraordinary translation of an uncannily singular novel, one which the judges will be savoring for many years to come.”

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000)

For a book-length translation of poetry from any language into English published in 2018. JUDGES: Sinan Antoon, Ewa Chrusciel, Peter Filkins, Katrine Øgaard Jensen

A Certain Plume, Henri Michaux (NYRB)
Translated from the French by Richard Sieburth
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From the judges’ citation: “Among many very fine translations the judges had the pleasure to consider, Richard Sieburth’s translation of Henri Michaux’s A Certain Plume stood out for its careful handling of tone and colloquial register in the deft navigation of the uncanny. Like Chaplin’s Little Tramp and Kafka’s Josef K., Michaux’s Plume stumbles and bungles his way through modern life, only to artfully sustain the dignified poise of the human amid the absurd machinations that seek to consume him. Not only does Sieburth’s translation do justice to Plume’s tightrope act above the abyss, it also restores the original shape of Michaux’s 1930 Un certain Plume, placing it convincingly in the modern pantheon through notes and an excellent afterword. Tone and timing are the chief catalysts of the prose poem, and Richard Sieburth has shown Henri Michaux to be a master of both.”

Honorable Mention: The judges also felt strongly that Karen Kovacik’s translation of Jacek Dehnel’s Aperture deserves a special Honorable Mention for her nimble translations of metrical, rhymed, free verse, and prose poems from the Polish. Dehnel’s sharp eye pierces to the core of contemporary life, laying bare emptiness and ennui like a skilled surgeon. Kovacik proves herself every bit his match in artistry and acumen.

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000)

For a book of essays published in 2018 that exemplifies the essay form. JUDGES: Garrard Conley, Paul Reyes, Aisha Sabatini Sloan

Against Memoir, Michelle Tea (Feminist Press)
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From the judges’ citation: “Tea’s anti-memoir harkens back to the days when queer was truly counterculture. On subjects as varied as marriage and Minor Threat, in a manner quick-witted and unabashedly intelligent, these essays rove, plunge, and spike. Each seems to set out with almost uninhibited bravery as she walks the terrain of memory or explores the mysteries of pop culture, all with sober precision; in other moments, the prose barrels forward in jubilant riffs, rendered with the fast, energetic, and angry strokes of punk. One senses in her work not just the art of writing but the art of having fun while doing it. Tea uses her own experience to add a sense of proximity and emotional depth that, taken together, vault her sentences toward unexpected poetry. Something ineffable lives within these pages; any subject in her hands—be it a band, a crush, or getting lost in a faraway city—feels organic and alive. Tea is one of those rare writers whose style is immediately recognizable yet inimitable, whose voice is as singularly irresistible as the punk culture that shaped her.”

PEN/Bograd Weld Prize for Biography ($5,000)

For a distinguished biography published in 2018. JUDGES: Nell Irvin Painter, Sam Stephenson, Rachel Syme

Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, Imani Perry (Beacon Press)
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From the judges’ citation: “Lorraine Hansberry packed a lot of ambition into a short life. When she died in 1965, at only 34 years old, she was already a New York legend: her award-winning drama, A Raisin in the Sun, about a black family living in segregated Chicago, became the first ever play by a black woman to debut on Broadway. But she did much more than write plays: Hansberry was also a devoted civil rights activist and venerated public intellectual, and a friend and colleague of James Baldwin, W.E.B DuBois, Nina Simone, and Malcolm X. Imani Perry’s Looking For Lorraine celebrates Hansberry, in all her accomplishments and appetites, but it does not shy away from the complexities and entanglements that made Hansberry’s life story as dramatic and serpentine as one of her plays. Perry approaches her subject with both empathy and a sharp, critical eye; this is a biography that exercises several muscles at once. Perry’s sentences are intimate, warm, and crisp; in considering Hansberry in all of her prismatic multiplicities, Perry has written a singular book.”

PEN/John KEnneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction ($10,000)

To honor a distinguished book of general nonfiction published in 2017 or 2018. JUDGES: Nana-Ama Danquah, McKenzie Funk, Syreeta McFadden, Christina Sharpe, Linda Villarosa

In a Day’s Work, Bernice Yeung (The New Press)
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From the judges’ citation: “Harrowing and deeply reported, In a Day’s Work forces readers to see the vulnerable women who too often go unseen, low-paid immigrants who pick produce, clean offices, and care for children and the elderly—and face devastating sexual violence and intimidation in the workplace. With great humanity and care for detail, Bernice Yeung makes clear the frequency and regularity of the abuse and the necessity of the efforts to unionize and support such workers. The book attends to the ways that women of color (from Latin America, South America, and the Caribbean) organize themselves and each other in the face of violence, intimidation, isolation, uncertain immigration status, shame, vulnerability, unfamiliarity with laws, and sexism in labor organizing. “There’s no way to defend yourself. […] That’s why you deal with everything, all of the harassment. […] You deal with it because you need the job,” says Georgina Hernández, one of In a Day’s Work’s many quiet heroes. Yeung has given us a book that is utterly necessary: sobering in the details and scope but hopeful in all of the ways that immigrant women come together to organize and collectively enact refusal.“

PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing ($10,000)

For a book that exemplifies literary excellence on the subject of the physical or biological sciences and communicates complex scientific concepts to a lay audience. JUDGES: Arianne Shahvisi, Jeff VanderMeer, Christie Wilcox

Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, Ben Goldfarb (Chelsea Green)
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From the judges’ citation: “Sometimes the best thing humans can do for the environment is hand it over to another species. While it is widely known that beavers dam waterways, often in ways that frustrate human plans, it is rarely acknowledged that these nocturnal rodents can radically transform vast swathes of land, boosting biodiversity, recharging aquifers, purifying water, reducing pollution, and protecting against erosion and wildfires. Vast in scope but beautifully specific in detail, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter is an important environmental saga with clear implications for modern-day ecological policy. This true natural history portrays the inequities of settler impact on North America on a broad scale through a particular creature and ecosystem—revealing that we once lived in a much different world, and that we will struggle to reclaim that world without interspecies cooperation. While maintaining a strong central storyline, Goldfarb offers eye-opening, fascinating vignettes about these industrious engineering rodents and the people whose lives are devoted to reintroducing, protecting, and championing them. At times tragic and at times hopeful, Eager is a charming, surprising, and compelling lesson in the intricacies of ecosystems, and the limits of human hubris.”

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000)

To honor a nonfiction book on the subject of sports published in 2018. JUDGES: Chris Bachelder, Rafi Kohan, Carvell Wallace

The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, Rowan Ricardo Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
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From the judges’ citation: “The Circuit is a dizzy, unbridled, obsessive book about a love for tennis told by recounting the minutiae of the 2017 men’s season. Phillips transforms details into poetry as he follows the season-long trajectory of a gaggle of players culminating in a showdown between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. A book lovingly built for fans and non-fans alike, Phillips is uncommonly generous with the reader, taking time to render the game’s fine points with a ceremonious attention that can only be described as devotion. Such observance turns sport narrative into near religious text, and set against the dark backdrop of a Trump election and the author’s own recovery from a heinous Achilles injury, the book becomes a meditation on all things gorgeous and grave about the fragile human spirit and all it seeks to—and fails—to accomplish.”

PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature ($50,000)

The award will be conferred annually to a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, represents the highest level of achievement in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and/or drama, and is of enduring originality and consummate craftsmanship. JUDGES: Alexander Chee, Edwidge Danticat, Valeria Luiselli

SANDRA CISNEROS

From the judges: “Sandra Cisneros has said that she writes because ‘the world we live in is a house on fire and the people we love are burning.’ In a formidable and awe-inspiring body of work, which includes fiction, memoir, and poetry, Cisneros brings us astounding and lyrical voices from burning, maligned, devastated, as well as reassembled houses, and nations. It’s hard to imagine navigating our world today without her stories and her voice guiding us towards needed much reclamation and endurance.”

PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award

To a playwright working at the highest level of achievement in mid-career. JUDGES: Craig Lucas, Jacob G. Padron, Condola Rashad

LARISSA FASTHORSE

From the judges: “Larissa FastHorse is prolific not only in her work—17 plays in a little over a decade—but in the ways in which she explores the human condition. She digs into intercultural rifts within and outside family, employing dance and song and myth and history. She writes for children and adults, calling on a spirit of public discussion with a Chekhovian-sized empathy. The human comedy is everywhere in her stories, side by side with a jaundiced eye about class and our great national shortfall set against our founding ideals. The genocidal history of the U.S. government is never far from her sights, and there is no certainty that the malignancy lingering there is far from done with us. FastHorse educates, tweaks, embraces, outrages and dances, sometimes all in a single scene. Some of her plays (like Hunka) obey Aristotelean unities and could happily live in any commercial venue like Broadway or the West End while others (A Cherokee Family Reunion, for instance) call for the intimacy and understanding of a community-driven theater. She is an exceptional playwright and deserves to be much more widely known.”

PEN/Nora Magid Award for Editing

To 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. JUDGES: Mark Doten, Kima Jones, Daniel A. Olivas

ALEXANDRA WATSON

From the judges: “There are many journals and their editors who deserve recognition for the tireless and often unpaid work of running a nonprofit literary outfit. We could’ve named other, equally admirable, journals for this award but Alexandra Watson has demonstrated that within the pages of Apogee there is no room for timidity. From the life of Sandra Bland to migrant reamaginings, through visual art and poetry and prose, Alexandra Watson captures and curates around the concerns of her generation. Apogee is a lionhearted enterprise, one that deserves our full critical attention, and all of the resources that we can afford it.”

PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing

To a living sports writer for their literary merit and dedication to sports writing with keen knowledge, insight, and a literary voice. JUDGES: Chris Bachelder, Rafi Kohan, Carvell Wallace

JACKIE “MAC” MACMULLAN

From the judges: “Since joining the Boston Globe as a sports writer at the age of 22, Jackie MacMullan has been one of the most respected and prolific journalists in the country. She established herself as a beat reporter for the Boston Celtics at a time when women were even more rare in the field than they are today and through her meticulous knowledge of the game, clear-headedness and honesty she was able to not only make a lane for herself but gain the respect and trust of the game’s biggest names. The result was first a deluge of sharp and agile columns covering everything from trade rumors to player profiles, to the details of specific plays, and then a series of books based on her unique ability to gather oral histories—the memoirs of Larry Bird, Shaquille O’Neal, Geno Auriemma, as well as the 2009 New York Times best seller When The Game Was Ours with Bird and Magic Johnson. Her 2018 epic, Basketball: A Love Story—written alongside Rafe Bartholomew drew upon nearly a thousand hours of interviews to create a deeply literary, profoundly intimate book that may well be one of the most ambitious and definitive ever written about the game.”

PEN/Osterweil Award for Poetry

To a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature. JUDGES: Daniel Borzutzky, Ilya Kaminsky, Airea D. Matthews

JONAH MIXON-WEBSTER

From the judges: “Jonah Mixon-Webster’s Stereo(TYPE) is vibrant. It’s full of life. It’s a book that shows us how to approach a violent nation, how to approach a racist nation, how to write a poetry that is intricately engaged with the trauma of the public sphere. Stereo(TYPE) is performative, formally innovative, visually innovative as it captures our national epidemics of racial violence and ecoviolence. Written as prose poems, as invocations, in unconventional typographies, in dialogic plays, as Frequently Asked Questions, as government brochures and concrete poems, Stereo(TYPE)’s depth and bravery reverberates from each breath, each word, each page.”