Kima Jones Wins Granum Foundation Prize, Katherine E. Young Wins Translation Prize

Kima Jones wins Granum Foundation Prize (Photo by Jones)

Katherine E. Young wins Granum Foundation Translation Prize (Photo by Christopher Shane)

November 9, 2022 – Congratulations to Kima Jones, winner of the 2022 Granum Foundation Prize, and Katherine E. Young, winner of the 2022 Granum Foundation Translation Prize.

Finalists for the Granum Prize include: Avigayl Sharp, Nathan Curtis Roberts, Donika Kelly, and Omer Friedlander.

Kima Jones’s writing has appeared nationally in GQ, Guernica, Poets & Writers, and McSweeney’s. Her short story, “Nine,” received notable mention in Best American Science Fiction 2015, and her hybrid poem, “Homegoing AD,” appears in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017. Jones is the founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, the first book publicity agency exclusively in service to black and brown writers. She launched the Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat, and Culture, Too, a conference for cultural critics of color.

Jones describes her memoir, Butch, for which she is awarded the Granum Foundation Prize and $5,000, as a “liturgical survival text for black women.” This powerful book details her life as a foster child growing up in the 1980s, while also exploring the cultural history of Harlem and the history of prisons on America. Butch is forthcoming from Knopf in fall 2023.

Katherine E. Young is the translator of Look at Him by Anna Starobinets, Farewell, Aylis and Stone Dreams by Akram Aylisli, and two poetry collections by Inna Kabysh. She was the 2022 Pushkin House Translation Residency Awardee, a 2020 Arlington County Individual Artist Grant recipient, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellow, and a 2015 Hawthornden Fellow. From 2016 to 2018, she served as the inaugural poet laureate for Arlington, Virginia. She is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe and Day of the Border Guards. 

For her proposed Granum Translation Prize project, Young is translating one of Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli’s best-known works, the trilogy of novellas titled People and Trees, which has been published in more than 30 languages, but has never been translated into English. People and Trees, which is currently in search of a publisher, is set during and just after the Second World War. Young will receive $1,000 for her work.

Four finalists were selected for this year’s Granum Foundation Prize. Each finalist will receive $1,000.

·      Avigayl Sharp is completing her first book, a short story collection titled Uncontrollable, Irrelevant that explores “questions of inheritance and absence; lineages of violence, fantasy, and obsession; and the entanglement of personal responsibility with historical causality.” Influenced by the tradition of Jewish tragicomedy storytelling, her work has appeared in New England Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, and Pleiades, among others.

·      Nathan Curtis Roberts’s work-in-progress, Cyclops: A Memoir, is a book about addiction and suicidal ideation “in a fun way!” It’s also about his penis. He explores growing up gay and Mormon in the San Francisco Bay Area and the breakdown of that upbringing in the context of medical realities. He has received an Individual Artist grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Alaska Quarterly Review, Spectrum, and The Threepenny Review, among others.

·      Donika Kelly is the author of two full-length poetry collections, The Renunciations (Graywolf 2021) and Bestiary (Graywolf 2016). Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, she is working on her third collection, tentatively titled Fluke. Her work “posits that family, memory, and loss can be understood alongside the irrevocable effects of the Anthropocene.” Learn more about Kelly through her interview with The Artist’s Statement podcast.

·      Omer Friedlander recently published his short story collection, The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land (Random House 2022). He received fellowships from Bread Loaf and the Vermont Studio Center, and he was Saul Bellow Fellow at Boston University and Starworks Fellow in Fiction at New York University. He is finishing a first draft of his novel The Glass Golem, partly inspired by the story of his grandfather and Pulitzer Prize recipient, Saul Friedlander.

Congratulations to the winners and finalists, and thank you to everyone who applied. With nearly 1,250 applications, we were inspired by the wealth of impressive work throughout the country, and we look forward to supporting more worthy projects in the coming years.