The Ecotone/Lookout team is thrilled that so many of our contributors have been recognized by the 2017 PEN Literary Awards. Each year PEN uses its Literary Awards program to honor the best and brightest in fiction, science writing, essays, sports writing, biography, children’s literature, translation, drama, and poetry, and we’ve got our fingers crossed for these writers as the award announcements approach!
We Show What We Have Learned (Lookout Books/UNC Wilmington), Clare Beams (“Granna” in Ecotone)
From Publisher’s Weekly: “Beams is an expert at providing odd and surprising details that make her stories come alive, and the result is a powerful collection about what we need from others and, in turn, what we can offer others of ourselves.”
The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood (Graywolf Press), Belle Boggs (“Imaginary Children” and “Peanut Hospital” in Ecotone)
From the New York Times: “[A] thoughtful meditation on childlessness, childbearing, and—for some—the stretch of liminal agony in between.”
Becoming Earth (Red Hen Press), Eva Saulitis (“Becoming Earth” in Ecotone)
From the publisher: In this posthumous collection of essays, Eva Saulitis meditates on martality, the art of living fully, and her advancing illness and nearing death, confronting the waiting question without fear or sentimentality: how are you going to live when you know you are going to die?
The Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America (W.W. Norton & Company), Patrick Phillips (“The Singing” in Ecotone)
From the publisher: A gripping tale of racial cleansing in Forsyth County, Georgia, and a harrowing testament to the deep roots of racial violence in America.
Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press), Safiya Sinclair (“Another White Christmas inVirginia” in Ecotone)
From the publisher: Colliding with and confronting The Tempest and postcolonial identity, the poems in Safiya Sinclair’s Cannibal explore Jamaican childhood and history, race relations in America, womanhood, otherness, and exile.
Award finalists will be announced by PEN on Jan. 18, 2017, and winners will be announced Feb. 22. (With the exception of the awards conferred for debut fiction and essay, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the PEN/Nabokov Award, which will be announced live at PEN’s award ceremony). And finally, the winners will be celebrated on March 27 at the PEN America Literary Award ceremony hosted at the New School in New York City.