A.J. Rodriguez and Tony Hao win Granum Prizes

A.J. Rodriguez (Photo by Greg Luna)

Tony Hao (Photo by Tong Wei-Ger)

November 14, 2024 – The Granum Foundation is delighted to announce the results of this year’s competition. A.J. Rodriguez has been named the winner of the 2024 Granum Foundation Prize for his novel in progress, tentatively titled Luchadores. Tony Hao has been selected as the 2024 Granum Foundation Translation Prize winner for his translation of Tong Wei-Ger’s novel The Northwest Rain. Finalists for the Granum Foundation Prize include Jonathan Gleason, Amanda Mei Kim, Joy Priest, and Carter Sickels.

Rodriguez is a Chicano writer born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon’s MFA program and the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Kerouac Project. His stories have won CRAFT’s Flash Fiction Contest, the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize, second place in Salamander’s Fiction Contest, and the Kinder/Crump Award for Short Fiction from Pleiades. His fiction also appears in New England Review, Passages North, The Common, and elsewhere.

Hao is a Connecticut-based Chinese-to-English translator specializing in Mandarin prose. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Granta, The Common, Books from Taiwan, MAYDAY Magazine and elsewhere. Hao is a former mentee of The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA)’s Emerging Translator Mentorship Program. For his translation of Tong’s fiction, he was selected for the Art Omi Translation Lab. Tong’s The Northwest Rain was the winner of the 2010 Taiwan Literature Awards Golden Book Award.

Gleason graduated from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program. A section of his manuscript Field Guide to Falling Ill was shortlisted for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and was a finalist for the Miami Book Fair Emerging Writer Fellowship. His full-length book will be published in 2025 as the inaugural winner of the Yale Nonfiction Book Prize. He is a recipient of a 2023 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and his writing has appeared in Best American Essays (2024), The Sun Magazine, Literary Hub, New England Review, The Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, and others.

Kim is currently part of Narrative Initiative’s Changemakers program for activist writers. She is a former Steinbeck, de Groot Foundation, and California Arts Council Fellow. Essays from her memoir-in-progress, for which she received Granum’s recognition, have appeared in NY Times, [PANK], LitHub, Brick, Tayo Literary Magazine, Eastwind Magazine, and an anthology from Woodhall Press. One essay was listed as a notable essay in Best American Essays (2022), and another was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Priest’s first poetry collection, HORSEPOWER, was the winner of the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was nominated for the John Leonard Prize for Best First Book by the National Book Critics Circle Awards. She has been awarded a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from the American Poetry Review, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She is the editor of Once a City Said: A Louisville Poets Anthology. Priest earned her bachelor’s degree in print journalism from the University of Kentucky, her MFA in poetry from the University of South Carolina, and her PhD in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston. Her poetry manuscript-in-progress is tentatively titled The Black Outside.

Sickels is the author of The Prettiest Star and winner of the 2021 Southern Book Prize and the Weatherford Award. His novel was selected as a Kirkus Best Book of 2020 and a Best LGBT Book of 2020 by O Magazine. His debut novel, The Evening Hour, was an Oregon Book Award finalist and a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and was adapted into a feature film. His essays and fiction have appeared in The Atlantic, Oxford American, Poets & Writers, BuzzFeed, Joyland, Guernica, Catapult, and Electric Literature, among others. Carter is the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Emerging Writer Award, and earned fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. His novel-in-progress is tentatively titled Somebody’s Son.

Rodriguez will receive $5,000, finalists will receive $750 each, and Hao will receive $1,500.

Applications for the next round of funding are scheduled to open in May 2025.