Writers for Writers Award
The Writers for Writers Award celebrates authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. The award is presented each year at Poets & Writers’ annual gala. Recipients of the 2025 Writers for Writers Award will be Kimberly Blaeser, Angie Cruz, and Kiese Laymon.
Kimberly Blaeser is being recognized for nurturing and mentoring Indigenous poets through Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po), an organization she founded in 2020. A writer, photographer, and scholar, she is a past Wisconsin Poet Laureate (2015–2016) and the author of six poetry collections, including Ancient Light (University of Arizona Press, 2024) and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (Editions des Lisieres, 2020). Her editorial work includes curation of the video feature Songs at the Confluence: Indigenous Poets on Place and service as contributing editor for the anthology When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (W. W. Norton, 2020). Her photography has been featured in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, Blaeser is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation, an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. In leading Indigenous Nations Poets, she emphasizes the role of poetry in sustaining tribal sovereign nations. Through the organization she has sponsored opportunities such as a fellowship program, an annual mentoring retreat for emerging writers, and Indigenous #LanguageBack initiatives. Blaeser also serves on the Poetry Coalition of the Academy of American Poets, and as vice president of letters for Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. Her accolades include a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. (Credit: John Fisher)
Angie Cruz was selected for the award because of her leadership, advocacy, and community building. She is “una abridora de puertas” (a door opener)—especially for Latine writers. A novelist and editor, her most recent novel, How Not to Drown in A Glass of Water (Flatiron Books, 2022), was a finalist for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and chosen for the New York Times Book Review's “100 Notable Books of 2022.” Her novel Dominicana (Flatiron Books, 2019) was the inaugural book pick for Good Morning America’s GMA book club and shortlisted for the Women’s Prize, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction, a RUSA Notable book, and the winner of the Alex Award in fiction, administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association. Cruz is the author of two other novels, Soledad (Simon & Schuster, 2001) and Let It Rain Coffee (Simon & Schuster, 2005) and has published shorter works in the Paris Review, VQR, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, and elswwhere. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of the award-winning literary journal Aster(ix). (Credit: Erika Morillo)
Author Kiese Laymon was chosen for his generous contributions to other writers, which include establishing the Catherine Coleman Literary Arts, Food, and Justice Initiative, a unique literacy and cultural education program based at the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, which he founded and named in honor of his grandmother, as well as co-founding LIT 16, an initiative to celebrate new voices. A MacArthur Fellow and a Black southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi, Laymon is the author of the NAACP Image award-winning novel Long Division (Scribner, 2021) and the New York Times notable essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America (Scribner, 2020). His memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir (Scribner, 2018), won the Carnegie Medal and the Los Angeles Times Isherwood award, and was named the 2018 Audible Audiobook of the Year and one of the New York Times’ one hundred best books of the century. (Credit: D'Artagnan Winford)
Editor’s Award
The Editor’s Award recognizes book editors who have made an outstanding contribution to the publication of poetry or literary prose over a sustained period of time. For 2025, the awards selection committee made the unusual decision to honor not one but three Grove Atlantic editors jointly for their remarkable individual contributions to books of literary merit, as well as the collective and ongoing impact of Grove Atlantic on the literary conversation: Morgan Entrekin, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Peter Blackstock.
Morgan Entrekin grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. After graduating from Stanford and the Radcliffe Publishing Course, he joined Delacorte Press in 1977, where he worked with such authors as Richard Brautigan, Nick Tosches and Kurt Vonnegut. In 1985 he started his own imprint at Atlantic Monthly Press, publishing books by P.J. O’Rourke, Ron Chernow, and Francisco Goldman. In 1993, he merged Atlantic Monthly Press with Grove Press, the publisher of authors including Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard. Entrekin is currently the CEO and publisher of Grove Atlantic. Authors he has published include Mark Bowden, Candace Bushnell, Anne Enright, Richard Flanagan, Aminatta Forna, Jim Harrison, Donna Leon, Rian Malan, Walter Mosley, Will Self, and David Zucchino. In 2015, he launched Literary Hub, a website celebrating books, authors, and literary culture that now draws over five million visitors a month. (Credit: courtesy of Grove Atlantic)
Elisabeth Schmitz is vice president and editorial director of Grove Atlantic. She started at Grove Atlantic in 1994 as rights director. Authors she has acquired and edited for Grove include Charles Frazier, Lily King, Helen Macdonald, Michael Thomas, Leif Enger, Jeanette Winterson, Leila Aboulela, Lily Tuck, Emily Fridlund, Rabih Alameddine, Fae Myenne Ng, Samantha Harvey, Alexandra Fuller, Isabella Hammad, Jamie Quatro, Betsy Lerner and Paul Lynch. She also edits house authors including Francisco Goldman and Claire Keegan. Her authors have won the National Book Award, the Booker Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the Kirkus Prize, the Aspen Words Literary Prize, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. (Credit: Courtesy of Grove Atlantic)
Peter Blackstock is vice president and deputy publisher of Grove Atlantic. Originally from England, where he studied German and Russian at university, he began working at Grove in 2011 as editorial assistant to Morgan Entrekin. Authors he has published include Viet Thanh Nguyen, Abraham Verghese, Douglas Stuart, Bernardine Evaristo, Sayaka Murata, Eileen Myles, Yan Lianke, Jesse Eisenberg, Charmaine Craig, Ross Perlin, and Akwaeke Emezi. He handles much of Grove’s key backlist, including works by Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Kiran Desai, Frantz Fanon, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Juan Rulfo, and Tom Stoppard. His authors have won the Pulitzer Prize, the Booker Prize, the Sue Kaufman Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the Edgar Award, and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, among others. He is also the publisher of Grove Atlantic’s London-based imprint, Grove Press UK. (Credit: Tyler Kinder)
These awards will be presented on March 24, 2025, at the Poets & Writers Gala, In Celebration of Writers. Learn more here.
Previous Award Winners
2024
Laurie Halse Anderson
Roxane Gay
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Mitchell Kaplan (Champion for Writers Award)
2023
Colin Channer
Reyna Grande
Celeste Ng
Jennifer Hershey (Editor’s Award)
2022
Viet Thanh Nguyen
James Patterson
Sonia Sanchez
Sally Kim (Editor’s Award)
2020
Michael Chabon
Amanda Gorman
Oprah Winfrey (Leadership Award)
2019
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Neil Gaiman
Roxana Robinson
Dawn Davis (Editor’s Award)
2018
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Steve Cannon
Richard Russo
Rebecca Saletan (Editor’s Award)
2017
Francisco Goldman
Ann Patchett
Richard Shelton
Fiona McCrae (Editor’s Award)
Jeff Shotts (Editor’s Award)
2016
Elizabeth George
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Christopher Soto, and Javier Zamora
Erin Belieu, Cate Marvin, and Ann Townsend
Paul Slovack (Editor’s Award)
2015
Margaret Atwood
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Christopher Castellani
Barbara Epler (Editor’s Award)
2014
Ian Frazier
Haki R. Madhubuti
Joyce Carol Oates
Kate Medina (Editor’s Award)
2013
Steve Berry
Rigoberto Gonzalez
Judith Kelman
Chuck Adams (Editor’s Award)
Leonard Riggo (Leadership Award)
2012
David Baldacci
Kwame Dawes
Carol Muske-Dukes
Kathryn Court (Editor’s Award)
2011
Maria Mazziotti Gillan
John Grisham
Elizabeth Nunez
Jonathan Galassi (Editor’s Award)
2010
Junot Díaz
Maxine Hong Kingston
M. L. Liebler
Pat Strachan (Editor’s Award)
2009
Russell Banks
Robert Caro
Sarah Gambito
Daniel Halpern (Editor’s Award)
2008
Toi Derricotte
A.M. Homes
Peter Straub
2007
E. Ethelbert Miller
Francine Prose
Susan Richards Shreve
2006
Regie Cabico
Bill Henderson
Anna Quindlen
2005
Barbara Kingsolver
Sidney Offit
Quincy Troupe
2004
Judy Blume
Oakley Hall
Sharon Olds
2003
Bob Holman
Ishmael Reed
Amy Tan
2002
E. Lynn Harris
June Jordan
Wally Lamb
2001
Cornelius Eady
Marita Golden
Scott Turow
1999
Stanley Kunitz
Barbara Goldsmith
Terry McMillan
1998
Edward Albee
E. L. Doctorow
Susan Sontag
1997
Rita Dove
Stephen King
Hilma Wolitzer
1996
Mary Higgins Clark
James A. Michener
Arthur Miller
Walter Mosley
William Styron