266 posts in Category: News
Big congratulations to 2018 DISQUIET Program Assistant Kritika Pandey, who was awarded the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize for her story “The Great Indian Tee and Snakes.” You can read it in Granta, here.
Congratulations to alum Sarah Rose Etter, whose debut novel The Book of X won the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award for “works of horror, dark fantasy and psychological suspense that best exemplify the legacy of horror author Shirley Jackson.” You can read an exerpt from The Book of X here.
We’re thrilled to announce that Serena Simpson’s essay “On Choosing,” winner of the 2020 DISQUIET Prize for Nonfiction, has been published in Ninth Letter. You can read it online here.
From the introductory statement by editor Philip Graham: “[A]s Simpson examines personal decisions both private and public, she homes in on the small print of her experience, insisting on her individual interior self and not allowing it to be subsumed into a larger, perhaps discordant narrative. This is a very brave essay, one where declaration, accusation and confession wind around each other. It is truth-telling that goes deep.”
Don’t miss it!
Tayari Jones “holds the reader from first page to last, with her compassionate observation, her clear-eyed insight and her beautifully written and complex characters” (Amy Bloom). The author of four novels and a professor at Emory and Cornell, Jones’ most recent novel, the bestselling An American Marriage, received the prestigious 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. It was an Oprah’s Book Club pick and appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list.
A novelist of the highest order, she is also a great literary advocate for the work of others, see most recently her introductions to classic reissues of Ann Petry’s The Street and Delores Phillips’ The Darkest Child. Her NYT review of Stacey Abrams’ new memoir, which we recently posted, and this article, on voting conditions in Georgia evidence her savvy in political analysis as well.
You can read her interview with the Paris Review or this recent profile in Vogue, or this excerpt from An American Marriage.
Jones taught at DISQUIET in 2013 and was scheduled to return as our guest writer in 2020. We hope she’ll be able to join us for our postponed tenth-edition program in 2021.
Buy An American Marriage here or anywhere books are sold.
Shayla Lawson “writes like you’re having a conversation with your smartest, wisest, funniest friend and you don’t want it to end.” (R. Eric Thomas). Her new book of essays, This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope, comes out today from Harper Perennial, available here and everywhere.
The author of three books of poetry, most recently I Think I’m Ready to See Frank Ocean, and a professor at Amherst College, Lawson’s other projects include curating The Tenderness Project with Ross Gay and performing with her band The Oceanographers.
Hear her poem “Pantone 427 U“, read “Forrest Gump“, or hear her read from This Is Major at a Zoom reading for THE ANTIBODY.
Shayla Lawson was scheduled to lead a poetry workshop at Disquiet 2020, and we hope she’ll return for 2021.
Dear Friends,
As many of you know 2020 was to be the tenth edition of Disquiet. Because of COVID that celebration has been delayed until 2021, and now that the days that would have been Disquieted (June 21 – July 3) are upon us, the saudades have hit hard.
We will have much to say about ten years of DIsquiet at next year’s program, but right now in the US we are in the midst of a long-overdue cultural reckoning with the systems of racism and bias that underpin so much of American society. So we have decided to recognize the Disquiet that would have been by featuring each day the work of one Black writer who was slated to present at Disquiet 2020.
Please read and support them and their work, and consider coming to DISQUIET next year where, scheduling and health codes permitting, you’ll be able to work with them.
Sincerely,
The DISQUIET staff
Gabriel Bump reads from and discusses his debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, in an interview with Adam Coleman for Radio Open Source.
And if you missed this Electric Literature interview back in February, why not read it now?
Kylie Gellaty is participating in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Fundraising Drive for the month of June. Along with six other poets, she’s pledged to write one poem every day for thirty days to raise money for Tupelo Press. Carolyn Silveira is writing haiku to order for Covid relief funds. Don’t miss your chance to get a poem of your own!
A few news items from our alumni you may have missed:
Scott Edward Anderson was awarded the First Literary Prize from the publisher Letras Lavadas, in conjunction with PEN Azores, for his memoir Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances.
Marilyn Duarte’s essay Echoes of the Three Marias in the Me Too Movement was published in The Longleaf Review.
Vix Guiterrez’s essay Dark Sky City, workshopped at Disquiet 2019, was published in Subtropics.
Jennifer Jean collaborated with Amir Al-Azraki on a translation of “I Sleep in my Inkwell and Wave to the Distant,” appearing in the June issue of Poetry
Two Disquiet alumni, Aisha Sabatini Sloan and Theodore Wheeler, were awarded NEA fellowships for 2020.
Congratulations to all!
Alysia Sawchyn’s debut book of essays, A Fish Growing Lungs, is available now from Burrow Press!
“At age 18 Alysia Sawchyn was diagnosed with bipolar I. Seven years later she learned she had been misdiagnosed. A Fish Growing Lungs takes the form of linked essays that reflect on Sawchyn’s diagnosis and its unraveling, the process of withdrawal and recovery, and the search for identity as she emerges from a difficult past into a cautiously hopeful present.”
If it’s stll Wednesday afternoon when you read this, there may still be time to register for Alysia’s online book launch (7pm Eastern) via Zoom.