Los Angeles,
CA –Fiction writer Sean Bernard and poet
Craig Santos Perez are the recipients of this year’s California Writers
Exchange Award. Bernard and Perez will each receive an all-expenses-paid trip to New York City to give a
public reading and to meet with top literary professionals, including editors,
agents, publishers, and prominent writers. The judges were Karen Tei Yamashita
for fiction and Juan Felipe Herrera for poetry. The winners were chosen from a
pool of 692 fiction entries and 712 poetry entries.
Modeled on P&W’s Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award,
the California Writers Exchange was
open to writers who had lived in the state for at least two years and had not
published more than one book in the genre in which they were applying. The
California Writers Exchange contest
is funded by a grant from The James Irvine Foundation.
Sean Bernard, who won with the short story “California,” works as an associate professor of writing
at the University
of La Verne and edits the
literary journal Prism Review. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in
several journals, including Fourteen Hills, Santa Monica Review, and West Branch. He is currently writing a
period novel about Basque immigrants and angels. He lives in Claremont, California.
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru originally from the
Pacific Island of Guahan (Guam), won with poems selected from his collection from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press, 2008). His
poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Colorado Review, the Denver
Quarterly, the Iowa Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, and ZYZZYVA, among others. He is a co-founder of Achiote Press. He
received an MFA from the University of
San Francisco and is currently a PhD
candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University
of California, Berkeley. He lives in Santa Clara, California,
and blogs at craigsantosperez.wordpress.com.
View the complete list of California Writers Exchange finalists.
Read a sample of Sean Bernard's work.
Read a sample of Craig Santos Perez's work.
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