Writers for Writers Award and the Editor’s Award
Writers for Writers Award
Established in 1996, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award recognizes authors who have given generously to other writers or to the broader literary community. Honorees are chosen by a committee composed of past winners, other prominent writers, and the Board of Directors of Poets & Writers. Title of the award has been given to Barnes & Noble in appreciation of their extraordinary support of Poets & Writers. The 2011 recipients are Maria Maziotti Gillan, John Grisham, and Elizabeth Nunez.
Maria Mazziotti Gillan has promoted literature in Paterson, NJ, for more than thirty years. She is the founder and executive director of the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in Paterson, NJ and the editor of the Paterson Literary Review. She coordinated and created the Allen Ginsberg Awards, the Paterson Poetry Book Prize, the Paterson Fiction Book Prize, and the Prize for Books for Young People, and for many years has organized readings and workshops in public schools, as well as for adults and senior citizens, in Paterson. Through POETRYWORKS/USA she created a cable television program to highlight poetry and fiction by regional and national poets and writers. She directs the Creative Writing Program at Binghamton University-State University of New York, where she is Professor of Poetry. She has published twelve books of poetry, including All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions, 2007) which won the American Book Award. Her most recent book is What We Pass On: Collected Poems 1980-2009 (Guernica Editions, 2010).
John Grisham has done much to enrich the literary tradition of the American South. He was the publisher and principal investor in The Oxford American, and has endowed scholarships and writers? residencies at the University of Mississippi, where he attended the School of Law, after graduating from Mississippi State University. Grisham practiced criminal law for a decade. Since the publication of his first book, A Time to Kill (Wynwood Press) in 1989, Grisham has written one novel each year, including The Firm (Bantam Dell, 1991), The Pelican Brief (Doubleday, 1992) and The Client (Doubleday, 1993) and each has become an international bestseller. There are currently more than 250 million John Grisham books in print worldwide. His novels have been translated into 38 languages and nine of them have been adapted for film.
Elizabeth Nunez is a champion of American writers of color. She co-founded the National Black Writers Conference and served as its director for eighteen years. She also chaired the PEN American Center?s Open Book committee, helping to launch the PEN Beyond Margins award for writers of color. She was executive producer for the 2004 Emmy nominated CUNY TV series, Black Writers in America, aired on public television stations across the country. Currently, she conducts creative writing workshops for community residents in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Nunez received her PhD in English from New York University and is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, the City University of New York, where she teaches creative writing. She is the award-winning author of seven novels, including Anna In-Between (Akashic Books, 2009), Prospero’s Daughter (Ballantine Books, 2006), and Bruised Hibiscus (Seal Press, 2000), which won the American Book Award.
The Editor’s Award
Beginning in 2009, Poets & Writers began presenting an Editor’s Award, recognizing a book editor who has made an outstanding contribution to the publication of poetry or literary prose over a sustained period of time. The 2011 recipient is Jonathan Galassi.
Jonathan Galassi is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (FSG). He began his career as an editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in 1973, worked at Random House in the early 1980s, and joined FSG as vice-president and executive editor in 1986. Among the distinguished authors he has worked with at FSG are: Frank Bidart, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Ian Frazier, Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, Denis Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, Alice McDermott, John McPhee, Paul Muldoon, Robert Pinsky, Marilynne Robinson, Frederick Seidel, Susan Sontag, Mario Vargas Llosa, Derek Walcott, C.K. Williams, and Charles Wright. Galassi is the author of two books of poems: Morning Run (Paris Review Editions, 1988) and North Street (HarperCollins, 2000) and of translations of the poetry of Eugenio Montale (FSG, 1998) and Giacomo Leopardi (FSG, 2010).
Past Award Recipients
2010
Junot Díaz
Maxine Hong Kingston
M. L. Liebler
Pat Strachan (Editor’s Award)
2009
Russell Banks
Robert Caro
Sarah Gambito
Daniel Halpern (Editor’s Award)
2008
Toi Derricotte
A.M. Homes
Peter Straub
2007
E. Ethelbert Miller
Francine Prose
Susan Richards Shreve
* 2006
* Regie Cabico
* Bill Henderson
* Anna Quindlen
* 2005
* Barbara Kingsolver
* Sidney Offit
* Quincy Troupe
* 2004
* Judy Blume
* Oakley Hall
* Sharon Olds
* 2003
* Bob Holman
* Ishmael Reed
* Amy Tan
* 2002
* E. Lynn Harris
* June Jordan
* Wally Lamb
* 2001
* Cornelius Eady
* Marita Golden
* Scott Turow
* 1999
* Stanley Kunitz
* Barbara Goldsmith
* Terry McMillan
* 1998
* Edward Albee
* E.L. Doctorow
* Susan Sontag
* 1997
* Rita Dove
* Stephen King
* Hilma Wolitzer
* 1996
* Mary Higgins Clark
* James A. Michener
* Arthur Miller
* Walter Mosley
* William Styron