Hemingway and Winship Awards Ceremony
THE HEMINGWAY FOUNDATION & L. L. WINSHIP AWARDS
At the John F. Kennedy Library
Alice Hoffman
Keynote Speaker
Sunday, March 30, 2008 at 3:00 PM
Reception to follow.
Please RSVP at (617) 514-1645
2008 Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award
Then We Came To The End, Joshua Ferris
Finalists
Like Trees Walking, by Ravi Howard
Twenty Grand, by Rebecca Curtis
2008 L.L. Winship / PEN New England Awards
Karma and Other Stories, by Rishi Reddi
American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland, by Kristen Laine
Beloved Idea, by Ann Killough
Writing on the Walls: American Prison Writing, and the 2007 Vasyl Stus & Thomas Paine Awards
PEN New England and the Cambridge Forum to host
Writing on the Walls: American Prison Writing &
The 2007 Vasyl Stus & Thomas Paine Awards
Thursday, April 19, 2007 at 7:30 PM
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church
3 Church Street
Harvard Square
Cambridge, MA
On April 19, PEN New England’s Freedom-to-Write (FTW) Committee, in partnership with the Cambridge Forum, will host Writing on the Walls, a panel discussion about writing in, from, and about American prisons.
The panel, moderated by Dr. H. Bruce Franklin, Rutgers University professor and author of Prison Writings in 20th Century America, will feature:
- Jennifer Gonnerman, former Village Voice reporter, author of the National Book Award finalist Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
- Jimmy Santiago Baca, former inmate who, during five years in a maximum security prison, found a passion for poetry. Winner of a Pushcart Prize and an American Book Award, he is the author of A Place to Stand and The Importance of a Piece of Paper
- Jean Trounstine, author of Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison, documenting her ten years of work at Framingham Women’s Prison teaching literature and writing
- Dwayne Betts, former inmate of eight years and gifted poet, subsequently founded the YoungMenRead book club at the Washington, DC, bookstore he managed; subject of a recent feature article in the Washington Post, he’s now a Writer in Residence at the DC Creative Writing Workshops and a Cave Canem fellow
Writing on the Walls is being held in conjunction with the presentation of PEN New England’s annual Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award and the Thomas Paine Freedom-to-Write Award for American Writers. The Vasyl Stus Award recognizes a writer who has been persecuted for the peaceful expression of his or her views in writing, and whose courage in the face of censorship and oppression has been exemplary. The Thomas Paine Freedom to Write Award for American Writers recognizes and aids American writers who are either 1) being persecuted for their writings and for whom material aid would make a great difference in their struggle to defend themselves, or 2) speaking truth to power and thereby risking such persecution.
The Stus Award will be awarded to Vietnamese poet Vo Lam Te, held in a forced labor camp since 1979. Vo Lam Te, b. 1948, was deported without trial in 1975 for "re-education" in a forced labor camp, from which he escaped in 1978. The following year he was sentenced to 20 years for his human rights activities. While in prison Vo Lam Te composed a collection of poems, In Front of the Palace of Justice, which he attempted to smuggle out of the camp. Guards discovered the manuscript, and his sentence was increased to life imprisonment for "writing poetry in detention." After over 30 years of detention, ill treatment (including severe beatings), and malnutrition, Vo Lam Te is in very poor health.
The Thomas Paine Freedom-to-Write Award for American Writers will be awarded to Piri Thomas, an American of African and Puerto Rican descent, grew up in Spanish Harlem, faced a vicious street environment of poverty, racism, and crime, and served seven years of hard-labor incarceration in Sing Sing. Vowing “to use his street and prison know-how to reach hard core youth and turn them away from a life of crime,” Thomas then wrote the 1967 memoir Down These Mean Streets, which The New York Times called “something of a linguistic event. Gutter language, Spanish imagery and personal poetics ... mingle into a kind of individual statement that has very much its own sound...” He is also the author of several collections of poetry and stories and the memoir Seven Long Times.
For more information contact pen_ne@lesley.edu, and visit cambridgeforum.org.
Books by the participants will be available for sale and signing courtesy of the Harvard Bookstore.
2006 Hemingway/PEN and Winship Awards Ceremony
Sunday April 2, 2006
From 3:00 - 4:00 PM
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Boston, MA
On Sunday, April 2, PEN/New England and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum will honor Yiyun Li as the 2006 recipient of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House).
Patrick Hemingway, the son of Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway, will present the prestigious literary award at the April 2nd ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Joyce Carol Oates will serve as the ceremony's keynote speaker. Ernest Hemingway's papers are archived at the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. The late Mary Hemingway, the wife of Ernest Hemingway, founded the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award in 1976 to honor her late husband and draw attention to first books of fiction. Judges for the award this year were acclaimed fiction writers Charlotte Bacon and Bernard Cooper, both winners of the Hemingway/PEN award for their own first books, and Rosellen Brown.
Finalists in the competition for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award were Douglas Trevor for The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space (University of Iowa Press) and Daniel Alarcon for War by Candlelight (HarperCollins). Runners-up were Jess Row for The Train to Lo Wu (The Dial Press) and Karen Olsson for Waterloo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Yiyun Li will receive an $8,000 prize from the Hemingway Foundation and a one week residency in The Distinguished Visiting Writers Series at the University of Idaho's MFA Program in Creative Writing. Li and competition finalists and runners-up receive Ucross Residency Fellowships at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming, a retreat for artists and writers.
The ceremony will also honor writers Stanley Kunitz, Leo Damrosch, and Jennifer Haigh as recipients of the 2006 L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, given annually to an author from New England or to an author whose writing includes a New England setting. Mr. Kunitz is being recognized in the poetry category for The Wild Braid (W.W. Norton), Mr. Damrosch is being honored in the non-fiction category for Jean Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Houghton Mifflin), and Ms. Haigh is being honored in the fiction category for Baker Towers (HarperCollins). Judges for the awards this year were authors Rhina Espaillat, John Skoyles and Ted Weesner. The L.L. Winship/ PEN New England Award was established by The Boston Globe in 1975 to honor long-time Boston Globe editor Laurence L. Winship. It has been awarded in the past to E.B. White, Andre Dubus, Susan Cheever, Tracy Kidder, Mary Oliver, Susan Quinn, Jill Ker Conway, Jan Swafford, and Anita Shreve.
With a writing career that spans 25 years, Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, literary criticism and essays. Her writing has earned many awards including the National Book Award for her novel them (1969), the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy Institute of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Lifetime Achievement Award in Fiction, the Rea Award for Short Story, and in 1978, membership in the American Academy Institute. She also has been nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The ceremony will take place on Sunday, April 2, from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. and is free and open to the public. Those interested in attending should call the Kennedy Presidential Library at 617.514.1643 to reserve a seat.
For more details, visit the Awards section.
2005 Hemingway/PEN and L.L. Winship/PEN New England Literary Awards
Chris Abani to Receive Hemingway/PEN Award for Graceland
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Richard Russo to Deliver Keynote
On Sunday, April 10, PEN New England and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum will honor Chris Abani as the 2005 recipient of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for a distinguished first book of fiction for Graceland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).