The Asian American Writers’ Workshop announced today the appointment of Ken Chen to the post of executive director of the organization. His predecessor, Quang Bao, stepped down in January.

On Tuesday, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced the winners of the 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship Awards. Ten poets and seven fiction writers from the United States and Canada who demonstrate "distinguished achievement in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment" each received grants averaging $43,157.

 

A half-hour documentary on a local writing workshop that began in southern New Hampshire in 1974 is being aired on public television stations across the country during National Poetry Month. Mondays at Skimmilk: 30 Years of Writers at Work, directed by Ken Browne, originally aired last April on New Hampshire Public Television, but has since been picked up by American Public Television and is being presented on nearly fifty PBS stations in more than two dozen states.

Two weeks after customs officials detained British memoirist Sebastian Horsley and prevented him from entering the United States, the PEN American Center has issued a letter of appeal to the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to review the case and allow the author to return to the country. Horsley, who flew back to the U.K. after the incident at Newark Liberty International Airport on March 18, has been invited to paricipate in PEN's World Voices Festival of International Literature at the end of this month.

 

Khaled Hosseini's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead) was recently named the winner of the 2008 Book Sense Book of the Year Award in the category of fiction by the American Booksellers Association. Barbara Kingsolver, along with coauthors Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, won in nonfiction for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins).

British author Sebastian Horsley, whose memoir, Dandy in the Underworld (Sceptre, 2007), depicts a lifestyle of copious drug use and exploitation of prostitutes, was denied entry into the United States last Tuesday. U.S. customs officials at New Jersey's Newark Liberty International Airport detained Horsley, adorned in top hat and three-piece suit; after eight hours of questioning about his drug addiction and sexual exploits, he was deported.

The American Society of Magazine Editors announced yesterday the finalists for the 2008 National Magazine Awards. The annual awards, also known as the Ellies, honor print and online magazines "that consistently demonstrate superior execution of editorial objectives, innovative editorial techniques, noteworthy journalistic enterprise, and imaginative design." Among the 128 finalists in twenty-five categories were the usual titles—the New Yorker led the finalists with twelve nominations—but a number of literary magazines are also in the running.

The PEN/Faulkner Foundation announced last week that novelist Kate Christensen has been awarded the 2008 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her fourth novel, The Great Man (Doubleday). She received $15,000.