Meet the Judges for the 2016 PEN Literary Awards

Longlists announced: December 7

Shortlists announced: February 2

Winners announced: March 1

2016 PEN Literary Awards Ceremony: April 11

PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction ($25,000): To a living American author whose scale of achievement in fiction, over a sustained career, places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.  

JUDGES:

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her debut novel, Love Medicine, received the National Book Critics Circle Award; more recently, The Plague Of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and The Round House won the National Book Award. Louise Erdrich lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore. Her new novel, LaRose, will be publishing in Spring 2016. Erdrich was the 2014 winner of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award.

Dinaw Mengestu came to the U.S. with his family from Ethiopia at the age of two. He has published three novels, all of them New York Times Notable Books, including his most recent, All Our Names. A 2012 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, Mengestu also earned a 2007 National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” Award and was included on The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list in 2010. Also a freelance journalist who has reported from sub-Saharan Africa about life in Darfur, northern Uganda, and eastern Congo, Mengestu has had his work published in Harper’s, Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal.

Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in New York City.
 

PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction ($25,000): To an author whose debut work—a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2015—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise of a second work of literary fiction.

JUDGES: 

Helon Habila is an associate professor of creative writing at George Mason University. His novels include, Waiting for an Angel (2002), Measuring Time (2007), and Oil on Water (2010). He is the editor of The Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011). Habila’s novels, poems, and short stories have won many honors and awards, including the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Novel (Africa Section), the Caine Prize, and most recently the Windham-Campbell Prize. Habila has been a contributing editor for the Virginia Quarterly Review since 2004, and he is a regular reviewer for The Guardian, U.K. He lives in Virginia with his wife and three children.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of five books: Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry: Stories, the novels The Giant’s House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, the memoir An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, and Thunderstruck & Other Stories. She’s received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Liguria Study Center, the American Academy in Berlin, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
 

Edie Meidav is the author of three award-winning novels, most recently Lola, California (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2011), as well as the story and nonfiction collection Kingdom of the Young (Sarabande, 2017). She teaches in the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA program. Follow her at @lolacaliornia or find more information at www.ediemeidav.com.

Jess Row is the author of the story collections The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost and the novel Your Face in Mine. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, and Granta, have been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and have won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review.
 

PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, Founded by Barbara Kingsolver ($25,000): To a writer for an unpublished work of fiction that addresses issues of social justice and the impact of culture and politics on human relationships. The winner also receives a publishing contract with Algonquin Books.

JUDGES:

Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Guardian, and The New York Times. She is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.

Kathy Pories has been a senior editor at Algonquin Books for nineteen years. She acquires literary fiction and narrative nonfiction; was for many years the series editor of New Stories from the South; and has been the editor for the last five Bellwether Prize winners. Authors she has worked with include: Gabrielle Zevin, Rebecca Lee, Bill Roorbach, Lauren Grodstein, Michael Parker, Hillary Jordan, Robert Olmstead, Heidi Durrow, and others. She received her Ph.D. in English literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Brando Skyhorse is the author of The Madonnas of Echo Park, which received the 2011 PEN/Hemingway award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and Take This Man: A Memoir. He is also co-editing an anthology on passing which will publish in 2016. He is currently a visiting professor at Wesleyan University.

PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay ($10,000): For a book of essays published in 2015 that exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature.

JUDGES:

Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of six books: Making Hay (1986), The Last Fine Time (1991), The Rural Life (2003), Timothy: Or, Notes of an Abject Reptile (2006), Several Short Sentences About Writing (2011), and More Scenes From the Rural Life (2013). He is currently a member of the English Department and the School of Forestry at Yale University. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and was a member of the editorial board of The New York Times from 1997 to 2013. He lives in Manhattan and Columbia County, NY, with his wife, Alexandra Enders.

Meghan O’Rourke is the author of the memoir The Long Goodbye (Riverhead, 2011), as well as the poetry collections Once (2011) and Halflife (2007). She was awarded a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship and the Radcliffe Fellowship, among other prizes. She teaches at Princeton and New York University.

Luc Sante‘s books include Low Life, Evidence, The Factory of Facts, Kill All Your Darlings, Folk Photography, and The Other Paris (to be published in October). He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Grammy (for album notes), an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and Guggenheim and Cullman fellowships. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.
 

PEN/Fusion Emerging Writers Prize ($10,000): To a promising young writer under the age of 35 for an unpublished work of nonfiction that addresses a global and/or multicultural issue.

JUDGES:

Marie Arana is the author of five books, among them her memoir American Chica, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award and winner of Books for a Better Life; The Writing Life, a collection of essays; and two highly acclaimed novels Cellophane and Lima Nights. Her biography of Simón Bolívar was awarded the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2014. Since 2010, she has been a writer at large for the Washington Post and a senior advisor to the U.S. Librarian of Congress.

Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories and the forthcoming novel, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! He teaches creative writing for the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, and for the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Johnny Temple is the publisher and editor in chief of Akashic Books, an award-winning Brooklyn-based independent company. He won the 2013 Ellery Queen Award and is the editor of the anthology USA Noir, which was selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. He has taught courses on the publishing business at Wilkes University, Wesleyan University, and Pratt Institute; and is the Chair of the Brooklyn Literary Council, which organizes the annual Brooklyn Book Festival. He also plays bass guitar in the band Girls Against Boys, which has toured extensively across the globe and released numerous albums. He has contributed articles and political essays to various publications, including The Nation, Publishers Weekly, AlterNet, and Poets & Writers.
 

PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award ($10,000): For a book of literary nonfiction on the subject of the physical or biological sciences published in 2015.

JUDGES: 

Joshua Foer is the author of the international bestseller Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, which was a finalist for the 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Foer’s writing has been published in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, and Esquire. He is also the co-founder of Atlas Obscura.

Virginia Hughes is the science editor of BuzzFeed News. Before joining BuzzFeed, Ginny was an independent journalist specializing in genetics, neuroscience, and biotechnology. She was a contributing editor at Popular Science, and her blog, Only Human, was published by National Geographic. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Slate, and twice in The Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and energetic herding dog.
 

Sonia Shah is a science journalist and prize-winning author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Scientific American and has been featured on RadioLab, Fresh Air, and TED, where her talk, “Three Reasons We Still Haven’t Gotten Rid of Malaria” has been viewed by over 1,000,000 people. Her 2010 book, The Fever, was long-listed for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize. Her new book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, is forthcoming in February 2016.
 

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000): For a distinguished biography published in 2015.

JUDGES: 

Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History, Emerita, Princeton University, is the author of seven books, including The History of White People and Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol. A Guggenheim and Fulbright fellow, she has also been president of the Organization of American Historians. In 2009 she earned a BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, and, in 2011 an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, both in painting. She lives and works in Newark, New Jersey.
 

Deborah Solomon is a nationally-known critic and biographer. Her book American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell was shortlisted for the 2014 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Her book Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell will be re-issued in a new edition in October 2015. She is currently writing a biography of the artist Jasper Johns. A former columnist for The New York Times Magazine, she is the art critic of WNYC Public Radio and lives in New York City.
 

Simon Winchester is the New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman. His recent titles include Atlantic and The Men Who United the States. His most recent book, Pacific, was published by HarperCollins in October 2015. Winchester was awarded an Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his services to journalism and literature. He lives in Massachusetts and New York City.

PEN Open Book Award ($5,000): For an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2015.

JUDGES: 

Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of four books, including her most recent collection of poetry, Lighting the Shadow, published by Four Way Books in 2015. The recipient of fellowships including Yaddo, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Cave Canem Foundation, Griffiths teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is working on her first novel and lives in Brooklyn.

Celeste Ng is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Everything I Never Told You. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, One Story, Gulf Coast, The Millions, and elsewhere, and has been awarded the Pushcart Prize. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more about her, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing).

Héctor Tobar is a Los Angeles born author of four books, including Deep Down Dark and the novel The Barbarian Nurseries, both published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and translated into several languages. Tobar has an MFA in creative writing from the University of California Irvine. At the Los Angeles Times he worked as a city reporter, columnist, and foreign correspondent; he won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots. He is currently a professor at the University of Oregon.

PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): To a writer of a nonfiction book on the subject of sports published in 2015.

JUDGES: 

David Epstein is an author and journalist. Previously a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, Epstein is now an investigative reporter for ProPublica. His science writing has won a number of awards, including the 2010 Society of Professional Journalists prize for science and technology writing. His best-selling book The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance was a finalist for the 2014 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Epstein’s 2014 sports science TED Talk was among the 20 most viewed of the year.

Ann Killion, an award-winning sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and a New York Times best-selling author, has provided commentary on sports issues for two decades. Killion co-authored the best-selling memoir Solo: a Story of Hope, with soccer star Hope Solo and co-authored How to Throw Like a Girl, with gold medalist Jenny Finch. Awarded the NSSA California Sports Writer of the Year in 2014, Killion has also worked for the San Jose Mercury News and Los Angeles Times. She and her husband have two children and live in Mill Valley, California.

Dave Zirin is The Nation’s sports editor and the author of eight books on the politics of sports, most recently, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, The Olympics, and the Fight for Democracy. Named one of UTNE Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Our World,” Zirin is a frequent guest on ESPN, MSNBC, and Democracy Now! He also hosts his own weekly show, Edge of Sports Radio, and co-hosts The Collision: Where Sports and Politics Collide with former NBA player Etan Thomas.
 

PEN Translation Prize ($3,000): For a book-length translation of prose into English published in 2015.

JUDGES: 

Elisabeth Jaquette is a translator from the Arabic. She holds an MA from Columbia University and a BA from Swarthmore College. Her work has been published in The Guardian, Words Without Borders, and Asymptote Journal, among other places. She is also the Arabic reading group chair for U.K. publisher And Other Stories. Her first book-length translation is The Queue by Basma Abdel Aziz (forthcoming with Melville House in 2016), for which she received a 2014 English PEN Translates award.
 

Aviya Kushner is the author of The Grammar of God: A Journey into the Words and Worlds of the Bible (Spiegel & Grau, 2015). Her essays on translation and international literature have appeared in Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Partisan Review, Poets & Writers, and The Wilson Quarterly. She is an associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and is also a contributing editor at A Public Space and a mentor at The National Yiddish Book Center.
 

Ronald Meyer teaches the seminar on Russian literary translation at Columbia University. He received a translation grant from the Wheatland Foundation for his edition of Anna Akhmatova’s selected prose, My Half-Century (Ardis, 1992; reprinted by Northwestern and Overlook). Other translations include Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler and Other Stories (Penguin, 2010) and contemporary fiction by Karabchievsky, Levental, and Palei. Meyer is currently translating “book two” of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s historical novel, April 1917. He is a member of the PEN Translation Committee.

Sara Nović is the author of the novel Girl at War (Random House and Little, Brown U.K.). Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the LA Review of Books, VICE, Guernica, Electric Literature, TriQuarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and Circumference, among other publications. She is the recipient of the 2014 ALTA Fellowship and the 2014 Barnstone Literary Translation Prize. She is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine, and holds an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University.
 

Jeffrey Zuckerman is digital editor of Music & Literature Magazine. His translations from the French include Ananda Devi’s Eve Out of Her Ruins (Deep Vellum, 2016) and Antoine Volodine’s Radiant Terminus (Open Letter, 2017) as well as numerous texts by Marie Darrieussecq, Hervé Guibert, Régis Jauffret, and Kaija Saariaho, among others. A graduate of Yale University, his writing and translations have appeared in Best European Fiction, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Paris Review Daily, Tin House, and Vice.

PEN Award for Poetry in Translation ($3,000): For a book-length translation of poetry into English published in 2015.

JUDGE: 

Urayoán Noel is a poet, critic, translator, performer, and assistant professor of English and Spanish at New York University. A former CantoMundo and Ford Foundation fellow, his books include the critical study In Visible Movement: Nuyorican Poetry from the Sixties to Slam (University of Iowa Press, 2014), winner of the LASA-Latino Studies Book Award, and several collections of poetry in English and Spanish, most recently Buzzing Hemisphere/Rumor Hemisférico (University of Arizona Press, 2015). Noel’s bilingual edition of the poetry of Pablo de Rokha is forthcoming from Shearsman Books.

PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Awards ($7,500 and $2,500): Three awards which honor a Master American Dramatist, American Playwright in Mid-Career, and Emerging American Playwright.

JUDGES: 

Annie Baker‘s full-length plays include John, The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation, The Aliens, Body Awareness, and an adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, for which she also designed the costumes. Her plays have been produced at over 150 theaters throughout the U.S., and have been produced internationally in over a dozen countries. Recent honors include a Pulitzer Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, Obie Award for Best New American Play, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Hull-Warriner Award, Steinberg Award, and the Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Kirsten Greenidge is a Village Voice/Obie Award winner and a recent PEN/Laura Pels Award recipient. She is the author of Luck of the Irish, Splendor, Bossa Nova, Rust, and many more. She has developed her work at Sundance, National New Play Network, The O’Neill, and New Dramatists, among many others. She is a Huntington Playwriting Fellow, a recipient of an NEA/TCG residency at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, and was playwright in residence at Company One Theatre. Her play Milk Like Sugar will be performed at the Huntington in January 2016.

Tracy Letts is the author of the plays Superior Donuts, August: Osage County, Killer Joe, Bug, Man From Nebraska (Pulitzer Prize finalist) and an adaptation of Chekov’s Three Sisters. He is an ensemble member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. His appearances there include: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Tony Award) Homebody/Kabul, The Dazzle, Glengarry Glen Ross, Three Days of Rain, and Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Letts was the recipient of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award for his play August: Osage County. The feature film version, which he also adapted, was produced by the Weinstein Company and starred Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. The film received two Academy Award Nominations.
 

PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry ($5,000): To a poet whose distinguished and growing body of work to date represents a notable and accomplished presence in American literature

Catherine Barnett is the author of The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012), winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004). Her honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches in graduate programs at New York University and Hunter College and works as an independent editor. She has degrees from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College and from Princeton University, where she has taught as a lecturer in the Lewis Center for the Arts.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award, and his second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. He is an associate professor in English and creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta.

Tina Chang is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn. The first woman named to this position, she was raised in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collections Half-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books) and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and The New York Times among others.

PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing ($5,000): To a writer whose body of work represents an exceptional contribution to the field of literary sports writing.

JUDGES: 

Senator William W. Bradley, is a managing director of Allen & Company LLC. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1979-1997 representing the state of New Jersey. In 2000, he was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. Prior to serving in the Senate, he was an Olympic gold medalist and a professional basketball player with the New York Knicks from 1967–1977 during which time they won two NBA championships. He has authored seven books on American politics, culture and economy, including his latest book We Can All Do Better.

Sally Jenkins is a columnist and feature writer for the Washington Post, and the author of twelve books, including The Real All Americans, a cultural history of the Carlisle Indian School’s role in fashioning modern football. Jenkins is a four-time winner of the Associated Press sports columnist of the year award, and an inductee into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame. But most proudly of all, she is the daughter of PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award winner Dan Jenkins.
 

Dave Kindred is the author of Sound and Fury, a dual biography of Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell. A newspaper and magazine columnist for 40 years, Kindred is a winner of the Red Smith Award for lifetime achievement in sports journalism and a member of the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame.

PEN/Phyllis Naylor Working Writer Fellowship ($5,000): To an author of children’s or young-adult fiction for a book-length work in progress.

JUDGES: 

Emily Arnold McCully graduated from Brown and earned an MA in art history at Columbia. She has published two adult novels and an O’Henry Best Short Story, and been a children’s book author/illustrator since the 60s. Her wordless Picnic won a Christopher Award, Mirette On the High Wire a Caldecott medal, and The Escape of Oney Judge a Jane Addams Award. Her YA biography of Ida M. Tarbell was a finalist for the YALSA Award.

Katherine Paterson is the author of sixteen novels for children and young people. She has twice won both the Newbery Medal and the National Book Award. For the body of her work she is the recipient of the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the NSK Neustadt Award, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. In 2000 the Library of Congress named her a Living Legend. Her latest book, published in October 2014, is Stories of My Life.

Jason Reynolds is crazy. About stories. After earning a BA in English from The University of Maryland, College Park, he moved to Brooklyn, New York. Jason Reynolds is the author of critically acclaimed When I Was the Greatest, for which he was the recipient of the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent, Boy in the Black Suit, and All American Boys, cowritten with Brendan Kiely. You can find his ramblings at JasonWritesBooks.com.

PEN/Edward and Lily Tuck Award for Paraguayan Literature ($3,000): To a living author of a major work of Paraguayan literature.

JUDGES:

Ezra E. Fitz has worked with Grammy winning musician Juanes, Emmy winning journalist Jorge Ramos, and the king of soccer himself, Pelé. His translations of contemporary Latin American literature by Alberto Fuguet and Eloy Urroz have been praised by The New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, and The Believer, among other publications. Fitz is also the author of an original novel titled The Morning Side of the Hill.

Amalia Gladhart, professor of Spanish at the University of Oregon, has written widely on contemporary Latin American literature and performance. She has published translations of three novels: The Potbellied Virgin and Beyond the Islands, both by Alicia Yánez Cossío (Ecuador); and Trafalgar, by Angélica Gorodischer (Argentina). Her collection of prose poems, Detours, was published by Burnside Review Press. Her poems and short fiction appear in Eleven Eleven, Literal Latté, Necessary Fiction, Stone Canoe, Bellingham Review, Cloudbank, and elsewhere.

Mark Weiss is author, most recently, of As Luck Would Have It (Shearsman Books). He has edited and was principle translator of two bilingual anthologies, Across the Line / Al otro lado: The Poetry of Baja California, and The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry. Among his translations are Stet: Selected Poems of José Kozer, Gaspar Orozco’s Notas del país de Z, and Virgilio Piñera’s La isla en peso/ The Whole Island (ebook, www.shearsman.com).

PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grants ($2,000-$4,000): To support the translation of book-length works into English.

JUDGES: Esther Allen, Peter Blackstock, Sara Khalili, Tynan Kogane, Allison Markin Powell, Antonio Romani, Chip Rossetti, and Alex Zucker

Judges for the annual PEN Literary Awards are selected by the PEN Literary Awards Committee.