[FAC] Manuel Munoz Wins $50K Whiting Award

Tue Nov 4 11:27:49 EST 2008

Dinuba-born author, Manuel Munoz, wins prestigious $50,000 Whiting Award...

Cross-posted from <http://www.whitingfoundation.org/whiting_2008.html>

<http://www.manuel-munoz.com>

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NEW YORK, OCTOBER 29*---The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation today named 
ten recipients of the 2008 Whiting Writers' Awards. The awards, which 
are $50,000 each, totaling $500,000, have been given annually since 1985 
to writers of exceptional talent and promise in early career.

Since its inception, the program has awarded more than $6 million to 240 
poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. Among the past 
recipients who have achieved acclaim and prominence in their field are 
Denis Johnson, Jorie Graham, Kim Edwards, William T. Vollman, Sarah 
Ruhl, Mark Doty, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, and Colson 
Whitehead.

This year's winners -- three of whom have yet to publish their first 
books -- represent an array of styles and backgrounds. There are five 
fiction writers, three poets, one nonfiction writer and one playwright.

"It's a great pleasure to see what fine work is coming out of this 
year's group of award recipients, in all its variousness and vigor, " 
said Barbara Bristol, the Director of the Writers' Program. "These 
writers are strikingly well-traveled in imagination if not in fact. We 
expect we will hear from them again and again in the years to come."

The 2008 recipients were announced at a ceremony at the Morgan Library & 
Museum in New York on Wednesday, October 29. Dr. Robert L. Belknap, 
President of the Foundation, and trustee Kate Douglas Torrey presented 
the ten writers with their awards.

The keynote speaker of the evening was distinguished fiction and 
nonfiction writer *Barry Lopez*. He is the author of /Arctic Dreams/, 
which won the National Book Award in 1986, /Of Wolves and Men/, which 
was a Finalist for the National Book Award in 1979, /Resistance/, and 
/Light Action in the Caribbean/, among other works. A life-long study of 
the human relationship to the natural world has brought him most 
recently to edit a compendium, /Home Ground: Language for an American 
Landscape/ (Trinity University Press). His essays are collected in two 
books, /Crossing Open Ground/ and /About This Life/. He lives in western 
Oregon.

The ten writers recognized this year for their extraordinary talent and 
promise are:

*Mischa Berlinski*, fiction. His first novel, /Fieldwork/, was a 
finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. He is at work on a second 
novel and living in Haiti.

*Rick Hilles*, poetry. His first collection, /Brother Salvage/, was 
published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. He is an assistant 
professor in the MFA Program at Vanderbilt University and lives in 
Nashville, Tennessee.

*Donovan Hohn*, nonfiction. His essays have appeared in /Harper's/, /The 
New York Times Magazine/, /Agni/, /The Bedford Reader/, and 
/Internazionale/. His first book will be published by Viking in 2010.

*Douglas Kearney*, poetry. He is the author of /Fear, Some/ (Red Hen 
Press, 2006) and the forthcoming collection, /The Black Automaton/, 
which will be published by Fence Books in 2009. He has an MFA in writing 
from the California Institute of the Arts, where he now teaches.

*Laleh Khadivi*, fiction. Her first book, /The Age of Orphans/, will be 
published by Bloomsbury in 2009. She is currently the fiction fellow at 
Emory University in Atlanta.

*Manuel Muñoz*, fiction. He is the author of two collections of short 
stories, /Zigzagger/ (Northwestern University Press, 2003) and /The 
Faith Healer of Olive Avenue/ (Algonquin Books, 2007). He lives in 
Tucson, where he is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the 
University of Arizona.

*Dael Orlandersmith*, plays. Her plays include /Yellowman/, /The 
Gimmick/ and her Obie-Award winning /Beauty's Daughter/, in which she 
also starred. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Sarah Lawrence 
College and is at work on a memoir..

*Benjamin Percy*, fiction. He is the author of two short story 
collections, /The Language of Elk/ (Carnegie Mellon, 2006) and /Refresh, 
Refresh/ (Graywolf, 2008). He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State 
University in Ames, Iowa.

*Julie Sheehan*, poetry. She is the author of two collections of poems, 
/Thaw/ (Fordham University Press, 2001), and /Orient Point/ (Norton, 
2006). She teaches in the graduate Writing and Literature program at 
Stony Brook Southampton and lives in East Quogue, New York.

*Lysley Tenorio*, fiction. He has recently completed a collection of 
short stories and is working on a novel. He lives in San Francisco and 
teaches at Saint Mary's College in Moraga, California.

*For more detailed biographies of the 2008 winners, click here 
<whiting_2008_bios.html>.*

Whiting Writers' Awards candidates are proposed by about a hundred 
anonymous nominators from across the country whose experience and 
vocations give them knowledge about individuals of extraordinary talent. 
Winners are chosen by a small anonymous selection committee of 
recognized writers, literary scholars, and editors, appointed annually 
by the Foundation. At four meetings over the course of the year, the 
selectors discuss the candidates' work and gradually winnow the list. 
They then recommend up to ten writers for awards to the Foundation's 
Trustees. The Foundation accepts nominations only from the designated 
nominators.

The Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation was established in 1963 by Flora E. 
Whiting. In 1972, her unrestricted bequest of over $10 million enabled 
the Foundation to establish the Whiting Fellowships in the Humanities 
for doctoral candidates in their dissertation year. In the years since, 
the Foundation has annually awarded grants to Bryn Mawr, University of 
Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale to fund these 
Fellowships, the recipients of which are selected by each institution. 
The Foundation created the Whiting Writers' Awards in 1985 under the 
direction of Gerald Freund, who organized and led the program until his 
death in 1997.

For more information about the selection process, click here <faq.html>. 

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