NBA Finalist Throwback

On the eve of the National Book Award winners announcement, we’re reminiscing over the list National Book Award Finalists. We were pleased as punch to see not only writers we love reading but also writers we’ve had the pleasure of publishing in the past.

If you have your copy of Issue 41 handy, you can find a throwback work by Susan Choi. Although she has been nominated for Trust Exercise (Henry Holt and Company / Macmillan Publishers), a novel that examines the intersections of identity for students in a prestigious high school’s acting class, Choi shared the nonfiction essay “Some Japanese Ghosts” with us. 2019 has proved to be a big year for Choi; along with Trust Exercise, her debut picture book, Camp Tiger (G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers), came out this year.

Back in Issue 38, we were able to publish two of Carmen Giménez Smith’s poems. Giménez Smith was nominated for her poetry collection, Be Recorder (Graywolf Press). This collection, like much of Giménez Smith’s work, deals heavily with identity, the conflicts between self and nation, and cultural critique. Be Recorder seems particularly timely to our current political climate: “Miss America from sea to shining sea / the huddled masses have a question / there is one of you and all of us.”

Although we haven’t published Jericho Brown, we did get to interview him about his second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), for Issue 36. With the NBA nomination for his third collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press), we can’t help but remember his words in this interview: “Once you start thinking of ‘poet’ as identity, once you start thinking that being a poet is just like being anything else that you are, as being something else that you were born, then you can go about doing the things that poets do, and you can go about that more comfortably. Or at least I think so.”

We’re incredibly proud of these writers and all the nominees for their accomplishments. We’re on the edge of our seats for tomorrow’s announcements. Until then, we’ll be reading through some of these old gems that we were lucky enough to find.