UI Press Books Win 2017 MLA Prizes

 

avilezWe are pleased to announce that Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism by GerShun Avilez has won the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association (MLA). The prize is given to an outstanding scholarly study of African American literature or culture. The committee said:

“The stunning achievement of GerShun Avilez’s Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism is its compelling expansion and queering of black nationalism through engagement with rhetorics that insist on formal innovation and experimentation as a method of translating the political anxieties, questions, and contradictions of the nationalism of the Black Arts era.”

 

IrizarryS16_144We are also pleased to announce that Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad by Ylce Irizarry has won the MLA Prize in United States Latina and Latino and Chicana and Chicano Literary and Cultural Studies. The committee said:

“Ylce Irizarry’s Chicana/o and Latina/o Fiction: The New Memory of Latinidad is a landmark study, offering a comparative analysis of Chicana/o, Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican fiction, read as distinct cultural narratives produced over a wide geopolitical terrain yet brought to convergence in what Irizarry calls collaborative architectures of meaning.”

 

BoyleS15_144Additionally, Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters, edited and with an introduction by Sandra Spanier, has won an honorable mention for the Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters from the Modern Language Association (MLA). The prize will be awarded at the MLA’s annual conference January 4-7, 2018, in New York City. The committee said:

“With Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters, Sandra Spanier has assembled a thoughtful selection that is representative of the life and literary phases of this leading figure among the Lost Generation modernists. Kay Boyle was at the center of literary and social developments in the twentieth century, traveling to France as a bride, living as an ex-pat and witnessing the spread of fascism, working as a foreign correspondent in Europe and then becoming a target of McCarthyism, and finally participating in American literary circles and the anti–Vietnam War movement. Enhancing the well-written and entertaining letters with an introduction, a chronology, numerous photographs, biographies of the correspondents, and a detailed index, Spanier has helped Boyle achieve the goal of writing a “record of our age” and has created a collection that is itself a work of literature.”

 

Congratulations to Ylce Irizarry, GerShun Avilez, and Sandra Spanier!


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