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Skywriting is often used for advertising or special occasions, such as a birthday or a marriage proposal. A small plane expels smoke as it flies in a specific pattern resulting in words that appear to be formed out of clouds for the world below. Write a short story in which two characters in two different locations glimpse a mysterious message written in the sky. How will the message bring your characters together?
Last night in New York City, the PEN American Center honored the recipients of the 2016 PEN Literary Awards. A selection of winners were announced in February; the winners of the following five awards were announced live at the ceremony.
Mia Alvar won the $25,000 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction for her story collection, In the Country (Knopf). Helon Habila, Elizabeth McCracken, Edie Meidav, and Jess Row judged. “It is rare to find a debut of such depth and breadth, work singing with the grace of a thousand doomed lifetimes compressed into stories both luminous and empathic, populated by memorable characters facing such keenly felt challenges,” the judges wrote.
Ta-Nehisi Coates took home the $10,000 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay for his critically acclaimed epistolary memoir, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau).
The PEN Open Book Award went to Rick Barot for his third poetry collection, Chord (Sarabande Books).
Lauren Redniss won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future (Random House).
Jean Guerrero received the inaugural PEN/FUSION emerging writers prize for her manuscript “Crux.” The $10,000 prize was established in 2015 to recognize an unpublished nonfiction manuscript by a writer under the age of thirty-five.
Meanwhile, novelist and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison was honored with the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.
This year, PEN will confer approximately $200,000 in awards, fellowships, grants, and prizes to writers and translators. Visit PEN’s website for a complete list of the 2016 Literary Award–winners.
(Photo: Mia Alvar, Credit: Deborah Lopez)
Watch a video of the awards ceremony below:
James Hannaham speaks about the importance of a good narrative and why people continue to read even when there's a spoiler to the plot. Hannaham was awarded the 36th annual PEN/Faulkner Award for his second novel, Delicious Foods (Little, Brown, 2015).
On Wednesday, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the recipients of its 2016 writing fellowships. Grants of approximately $50,000 each were awarded to twenty-two poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers in the United States and Canada on the basis of past achievement and exceptional promise.
The fellows in poetry are: Beth Bachmann of Nashville, Tennessee; Rick Barot of Tacoma, Washington; Jericho Brown of Decatur, Georgia; Stephen Burt of Belmont, Massachusetts; Cynthia Huntington of Post Mills, Vermont; Sally Keith of Washington, D.C.; James Kimbrell of Tallahassee, Florida; Deborah Landau of Brooklyn, New York; Ed Roberson of Chicago, Illinois; and Brian Turner of Orlando, Florida.
The fellows in fiction are: Jesse Ball of Chicago, Illinois; Jennifer Clement of New York, New York; Amity Gaige of West Hartford, Connecticut; Laila Lalami of Santa Monica, California; Jenny Offill of Red Hook, New York; Jess Row of New York, New York; René Steinke of Brooklyn, New York; and Melanie Rae Thon of Salt Lake City, Utah.
The fellows in nonfiction are: Adam Kirsch of New York, New York; Chris Kraus of Los Angeles, California; Amitava Kumar of Poughkeepsie, New York; Glenn Kurtz of New York, New York; Nick Laird of New York, New York; Paul Lisicky of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Amanda Petrusich of Brooklyn, New York; Robert Storr of New Haven, Connecticut; and Sarah Payne Stuart of Nobleboro, Maine.
Edward Hirsch, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, said of the 2016 class, “These artists and writers, scholars and scientists, represent the best of the best…It’s an honor to be able to support these individuals to do the work they were meant to do.”
Established in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship program has granted more than $334 million in annual awards to more than 18,000 individuals. This year, a total of 175 fellowships, including three joint fellowships, were awarded to 178 writers, artists, and scholars. For more information about the program and fellows, visit gf.org.
For the College of DuPage's Writers Read series, Leigh Stein shares a selection of poems inspired by her favorite reality TV shows, and from her books Dispatch From the Future (Melville House, 2012) and The Fallback Plan (Melville House, 2012).
"Was I jealous that Jack Kervorkian was free and I was not. Yes. Yes I was." In this book trailer for Leigh Stein's debut novel, The Fallback Plan (Melville House, 2012), a panda plays the part of the protagonist who moves back in with her parents after college.
"It's what we editors lose sleep over, you know. Are we really making books better or just making them different?" In the new biopic, Genius, Colin Firth stars as Maxwell Perkins, famous editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, played by Jude Law. The film is based on the National Book Award–winning biography Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (Dutton, 1978) by A. Scott Berg.
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jane Smiley explains why The Winter’s Tale is her favorite play by William Shakespeare. To commemorate the four hundred year anniversary of his death in April 2016, Folger Shakespeare Library has collected videos of people sharing their favorite Shakespeare stories.
Many people experience seasonal allergies during spring caused by the increased amount of pollen and grass present in the air. Write a short story in which one of your characters is affected by seasonal allergies. Is it a condition that proves to have surprisingly dramatic consequences, or one that simply adds a layer of pathos, humor, or realism to the story or character?
Educators David T. Freeman and Gregory Taylor share the power and reasoning behind William Shakespeare's usage of iambic pentameter in this TED-Ed short film animated by Brad Purnell.
