The PEN Center USA celebrated its 2012 Literary Award winners at a ceremony in Los Angeles. We’ve collected free samples of all the award winning works, follow the links below to explore.
At the ceremony, Joyce Carol Oates received lifetime achievement award. Screenplay winners Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon both thanked Oates for inspiring them, sharing a story about how Oates introduced Gansa to The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. We interviewed Gordon last year about his writing career–watch him in the video embedded above.
Here’s more about the awards: “Each year, PEN Center USA calls for submissions of work produced or published during one calendar year by writers living west of the Mississippi River. Entries in the eleven categories are reviewed and judged by panels of distinguished writers, critics and editors. Winners are announced the following September and each receives a $1,000 cash prize, a free year of membership with PEN Center USA and an invitation to the Annual Literary Awards Festival in Los Angeles.”
Free Samples of PEN Center USA’s 2012 Literary Award Winners
Fiction
Siobhan Fallon for You Know When the Men Are Gone (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam)
Poetry (Sponsored by Poetry Society of America)
Anne Waldman for The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press)
Research Nonfiction
Candice Millard for Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President (Doubleday/Anchor)
Creative Nonfiction
Eavan Boland for A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Translation
Suzanne Jill Levine for The Lizard’s Tale: A Novel, originally by Jose Donoso (Northwestern University Press)
Children’s/Young Adult Literature
Matthew J. Kirby for Icefall (Scholastic Press)
Graphic Literature
Joe Sacco for his “Outstanding Body of Work”
Journalism
Ben Ehrenreich for “Drip, Jordan: Israel’s water war with Palestine” (Harper’s Magazine)
Drama
Michelle Carter for How to Pray
Screenplay
Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig
Bridesmaids (Universal Pictures)
Teleplay
Alex Gansa, Howard Gordon, and Gideon Raff
Homeland: “Pilot” (Showtime)
UC Press Exceptional First Book Award
Beth Levy for Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West (UC Press)