Winner
Adriana E. Ramírez for her manuscript Dead Boys
The PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize is an annual award that recognizes a promising young writer of an unpublished work of nonfiction that addresses a global and/or multicultural issue.This award was conferred for the first time during PEN’s 2015 Awards cycle.
From the Judges’ Citation
Dead Boys ends with a chilling index of statistics about how far too many boys lose their lives to something senseless and uncontrollable—the drug trade. In this striking manuscript, Ramirez explores borders, violence, drug trafficking, the crimes that rise from the drug trade, and, most of all, dead boys and how they are slain, how they are mourned. Throughout, the ghost of her brother lingers, reminding us of the fragility of everything.”
Finalists
Melissa Petro for Unbecoming
Liz Quinn forThe Forgotten Midwives of Guatemala
Krystal Sital for Incantations
2015 Judges
John Freeman is the author of The Tyranny of Email and How to Read a Novelist. The former president of the National Book Critics Circle and editor of Granta magazine, his work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review. He now teaches writing at NYU and The New School. Starting in the fall of 2015, he will launch Freeman’s, a biannual literary journal and anthology which will be published by Grove Press. He edited his most recent book, Tales of Two Cities: The Best and Worst of Times in Today’s New York, in benefit of Housing Works. He lives in New York City.
Roxane Gay is the co-editor of PANK Magazine and author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State and Bad Feminist. Her pieces have been published in numerous anthologies and periodicals, including Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, TIME, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. Her memoir Hunger, will be published in 2016.
Cristina Henríquez is the author of three books, as well as numerous fiction and non-fiction pieces published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, The American Scholar, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, The Oxford American, Preservation and AGNI along with the anthology This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers. She was featured in Virginia Quarterly Review as one of “Fiction’s New Luminaries,” and is a recipient of the Alfredo Cisneros Del Moral Foundation Award. Her newest work, The Book of Unknown Americans, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2014. Photo Credit: Michael Lionstar
Click here for additional information, including submission guidelines, for the award.