Many of our past recipients have shared news of recent releases and literary achievements over the past year.
Selena Anderson’s (’19) stories will appear in the upcoming anthologies Best American Short Stories 2020 (Houghton Mifflin, November 2020) and Tiny Nightmares (Catapult, October 2020). She also received the 2020 Emerging Texas Star Award from American Short Fiction.
Erin Belieu's (’95) fifth poetry collection, Come-Hither Honeycomb, was released from Copper Canyon Press in February 2021.
Chelsea Bieker's (’18) debut novel, Godshot (Catapult, 2020), was longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and among NPR's Best Books of 2020.
Eula Biss's (’02) fourth book, Having and Being Had, has just been published by Riverhead Books (September 2020). It is one of NPR's Best Books of 2020. Ama Codjoe's (’17) collection Blood of the Air, received the 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize (Northwestern U. Press, 2020). Ebony Flowers’s (’17) graphic debut, Hot Comb, was published by Drawn and
Quarterly (2019) and received the 2019 Believer Book Award for Fiction. Ebony also received the 2020 Eisner Award for Best Short Story. She is the first Black woman to win this prize.
Janice N. Harrington (’09) (Primitive, BOA Editions, 2016) received a 2020 Guggenheim fellowship for poetry.
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers's (’97) most recent collection of poetry, The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020) was long listed for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry and was among NPR's Best Books of 2020. Her debut novel, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois (Harper) was released in 2021. (See more here.) Fowzia Karimi’s (’11) illustrated novel, Above Us the Milky Way, debuted from Deep Vellum in April 2020.
Ann Clare LeZotte's (’99) YA novel Show Me a Sign (Scholastic Books, 2020) is among NPR's Best Books of 2020.
Helen Phillips’s (’09) new novel, The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019), was
longlisted for the National Book Award and was a 2019 NYT Notable Book. She
received a 2020 Guggenheim fellowship.
Nicolette Polek’s (’19) debut, short story collection, Imaginary Museums, was
published by Soft Skull Press in 2020.
Alison C. Rollins (’18), (Library of Small Catastrophes, Copper Canyon Press,
2019), received a 2020 Pushcart prize and is a nominee for a 2020 Hurston/Wright
Foundation Legacy Award.
Asako Serizawa’s (’16) collection of stories, Inheritors, debuted from Doubleday in
July 2020. It received the 2021 PEN Open Book Award and the 2021 Story Prize Spotlight Award honoring books of exceptional promise by first-time authors.
Namwali Serpell’s (’11) most recent work is the collection of essays, Stranger Faces from Transit Books (October 2020). It was named one of The New Yorker's Best Books We Read in 2020. Her first novel, The Old Drift, debuted from Hogarth in 2019 and received the 2020 Anisfeld-Wolf Book Prize for Fiction. She is also the recipient of a 2020 Windham-Campbell Prize and a 2020 NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship. Rachel Swearingen’s (’12) first collection, How to Walk on Water, (2018 New American Press Fiction Prize winner) was published in fall 2020.
Merritt Tierce (’11) (Love Me Back, Doubleday, 2014) received a 2019 Whiting Writer’s Award.