Meet the 2022 AWP Award Series Winners at the #AWP24 Conference & Bookfair
February 2024
RECEPTION F247: AWP Award Series Reading and Celebration
Friday, February 9, 20244:45 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. CTBallroom D, Level 2, Kansas City Convention Center
The AWP Award Series is an annual competition for the publication of excellent new book-length works in four categories: poetry, creative nonfiction, novel, and short fiction. Below are details about the winning authors and newly published books we’ll be toasting in Kansas City.
2022 Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction
Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief: A Memoir by Jessica Hendry Nelson
University of Georgia Press
Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief is a fresh and ferocious memoir-in-essays that maps the boundaries of love, language, and creative urgency. When Nelson’s father dies from an accident caused by complications from alcoholism, she knows immediately she has inherited his love—that it left his body, traveled through the air, and entered her own. And so, she needs a place to put it. She needs to know what to do with it, how not to waste it, how to make something with it, how to honor it and put language to it. So, she places it with her brother, Eric, whose opioid addiction makes his death feel always imminent. With her partner, Jack, together for fifteen years. With her exhausted, grieving mother, her best friend Jessie, women at the gym she’s never had the courage to speak to, but loves completely. But mostly, she places it with her future child, the one she does not yet have but deeply wants. The child who is both the question of love—and the answer to it.
So, when Jack suddenly confesses that he does not want to have children—not with her, not ever—the someday vessel for her boundless and insatiable love hunger swiftly disappears, taking with it a fundamental promise of her life: motherhood. Joy Rides through the Tunnel of Grief catalyzes from this place. Fluidly navigating through past, present, and future, Nelson asks: Where does her desire to have a child come from? How does wonder charge and change a life? Are the imperatives to make art and to make a child born from the same searching place? Are they both masked and misguided attempts to thwart death? Nelson investigates the tremulous makings and unmakings of our most intense and fragile bonds—family, friends, lovers—with searing insight, humor, and tenderness.
Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (Counterpoint Press, 2014) which was selected as a best debut book by the Indies Introduce New Voices program, the Indies Next List by the American Booksellers' Association, a finalist for the Vermont Book Award, and named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Review. She is also coauthor of the textbook and anthology Advanced Creative Nonfiction: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, North American Review, The Carolina Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Columbia Journal, PANK, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. More at jessicahnelson.com.
Judge Brian Turner on Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief
“Jessica Hendry Nelson’s Joy Rides Through the Tunnel of Grief: A Memoir is a memoir of ‘contradictory truths’—where a father is dead and alive all at once, where the past is as present as the word now in a world ‘so full of love and longing and wonder and grief and fear.’ It is an elegy. It is a love song. It is a cry to women to renew their bonds with one another. It is a sister’s lament and it is a dirge for a marriage gone under. It is also a book-length braided meditation on the act of creation itself—from the creation of life to the creation of story. By the book’s end, it is a recognition that time is a construct, that everything is always happening all at once, that we carry as much of our lives within us as we can handle, for as long as we can. And ‘[c]all it god, call it love, call it archetypes, call it play, call it poetry, call it wonder, call it grace. There are no exclusions. It is & and & and & and & and.’ Call it Thunderstruck.”
2022 AWP Prize for the Novel
Inside the Mirror by Parul Kapur Hinzen
University of Nebraska Press
In 1950s Bombay, Jaya Malhotra studies medicine at the direction of her father, a champion of women’s education who assumes the right to choose his daughters’ vocations. A talented painter drawn to the city’s dynamic new modern art movement, Jaya is driven by her desire to express both the pain and extraordinary force of life of a nation rising from the devastation of British rule. Her twin sister, Kamlesh, a passionate student of Bharata Natyam dance, complies with her father’s decision that she become a schoolteacher while secretly pursuing forbidden dreams of dancing onstage and in the movies.
When Jaya moves out of her family home to live with a woman mentor, she suffers grievous consequences as a rare woman in the men’s domain of art. Not only does her departure from home threaten her family’s standing and crush her reputation; Jaya loses a vital connection to Kamlesh. Inside the Mirror is set in the aftermath of colonialism, as an impoverished India struggles to remake itself into a modern state. Jaya’s story encompasses art, history, political revolt, love, and women’s ambition to seize their own power.
Parul Kapur Hinzen was born in Assam, India, and grew up in Connecticut. Her fiction centers on the aftermath of colonialism and immigration, and appears or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Midway Journal, Wascana Review, Frank, and the anthology {Ex}tinguished & {Ex}tinct. She has written for the New Yorker, The Paris Review, the Wall Street Journal Europe, Esquire, Newsday, Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica, and Slate. She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and she lives in Atlanta with her husband and son.
Judge Brandon Hobson on Inside the Mirror
“Inside the Mirror is an extraordinary and moving story about two twin sisters, Jaya and Kamesh, as they struggle to pursue their passion and independence as women artists from a conservative society. Crafted with elegance and precision, and heartrending in its exploration of family drama, this novel is a beautiful and ambitious work of fiction.”
2022 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Octobers by Sahar Muradi
University of Pittsburgh Press
Octobers traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: the US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language—as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.
Sahar Muradi is author of the chapbook [ G A T E S ] (Black Lawrence Press), the hybrid memoir Ask Hafiz (winner of the 2021 Patrons’ Prize for Emerging Artists from Thornwillow Press), and the chaplet A Garden Beyond My Hand (Belladonna*). She is coauthor of A Ritual in X Movements (Montez Press), and coeditor of One Story, Thirty Stories: An Anthology of Contemporary Afghan American Literature (University of Arkansas Press). Sahar is a cofounder of the Afghan American Artists & Writers Association, and she directs the arts education programs at City Lore. She dearly believes in the bottom of the rice pot.
Judge Naomi Shihab Nye on Octobers
“Octobers is a richly gripping poem-journey through lives and languages, migrations/transitions, with profound openness to curious complexity. The poet employs subtly understated images, reeling us in to woven mysteries of time and story. Births, childhoods, cities, histories, quiet discoveries, studding the wide panoply of chaos and possibility—I loved the quietude of these brilliant scenes, their haunted reverberations. It’s as if the poet is speaking up from a difficult, often silent space for those who are forced to flee, recalibrate, make new homes, somewhere, anywhere, right here: ‘this one morning with its distinct wink’—brilliant. I felt I had never read anything quite like this voice before—it’s rare and so important.”
2022 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction
A Professional Lola by E. P. Tuazon
Red Hen Press
A Professional Lola is a collection of short stories that blend literary fiction with the surreal to present the contemporary Filipino American experience and its universal themes of love, family, and identity. A family hires an actress to play their beloved grandmother at a party; a couple craving Filipino food rob a panaderya; a coven of Filipino witches cast a spell on their husbands; a Lolo transforms into a Lola. These are just a few of the stories in the collection that represent its roster of stories beautifully grounded in culture and vividly and meticulously painted to make the absurd seem mundane and the commonplace, sinister. A Professional Lola embodies the joy, mystery, humor, sadness, hunger, and family that inhabit modern-day Filipino American virtues.
E. P. Tuazon is a Filipino American writer from Los Angeles. They have work in several publications, and just released their newest novella called The Cussing Cat Clock (HASH Journal, 2022). They were a finalist for the 2021 Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize in Fiction and the 2021 Five South Short Fiction Prize, and a winner of the 2022 Berkeley Fiction Review Sudden Fiction Contest. They are currently a member of Advintage Press and The Blank Page Writing Club at the Open Book, Canyon Country. In their spare time, they like to wander the seafood section of Filipino markets to gossip with the crabs.
Judge ZZ Packer on A Professional Lola
“A Professional Lola is a story collection that works by way of small, tiny miracles: a family hires a professional ‘lola’—to remember the grandmother they've lost; a couple bonds over their homesickness for just the right Filipino food—and will resort to the most drastic means to get it. In one story a divorce lawyer wears an ‘elaborately embroidered white barong’ to greet his firm's clients instead of a suit and tie, this white barong that hugs our hero's boss ‘like a coat of mist’ comes to stand in for the confidence, charisma, and imperviousness to grief our narrator lacks—and must claw back through his own past to find.
Every story is madly scented with food we can't help but salivate over: ‘skewered lapu-lapu and blue crab’ over ‘an open fire while rice steamed in banana leaves . . . the smell of mint, cilantro, kalamansi, ginger;’ we crave the saba banana slices of turon that crackle and wheeze until ‘transformed golden brown;’ the buko, ube, and red bean pandesal worth dreaming of stealing; or the bilo-bilo description that causes one twin to realize his brother has fallen in love.
These tales of Filipinos and Filipino Americans—gay, bi, straight, trans, lovelorn, longing, curious, grief-stricken, and hopeful—are a breath of fresh air. Each story is like a snapshot, a curio, a window-pane glimpse into lives caught mid-moment and on the verge. Populated by ex-beauty queens and performances artists, dancers and nurses, lawyers, stick-up artists, and Bigfoot obsessives, each story is an engine unto itself. E. P. Tuazon is a bright star who is only getting started.”