2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards

Abstract

2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards Beth McCabe, Director We are pleased to announce that three writers with connections to Callaloo will receive 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards, which are given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. Celebrating its 22nd year, the Rona Jaffe Awards have helped many women build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time. The Awards are $30,000 each and will be presented to the six recipients on September 15th in New York City. Fiction writer JAMEY HATLEY has attended Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops in the past, and her work appeared in Callaloo in 2014. Her first novel, The Dream-Singers, is the story of twins, one born at the moment Martin Luther King, Jr., delivers his final speech and the other at the moment King dies. After the devastation of the assassination, the people in an all-black neighborhood of Memphis fixate on the babies as a symbol of hope. Their hope is short-lived when the boy twin dies under mysterious circumstances just three months later. Her nominator writes, “Reading her work is like witnessing past, present, and future on one page. She creates a very convincing community and voice through her use of fable.” Ms. Hatley has recently returned to her hometown of Memphis to care for her elderly parents. She says, “So many of the themes that were already present in my novel have become starkly real since my return: dreams as debt, who gets to leave home and who must stay, the responsibility to home and collective amnesia. It attempts to interrogate the cliché to ‘just follow your dreams’ and reveal what a complex proposition that is for a community where one of the most famous dreamers of all time is killed.” In addition to Callaloo, her work has appeared in The Account and Oxford American, among others. She has attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference for the past five years and is the recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She received her BS from the University of Tennessee, her MA in journalism from the University of Memphis, and her MFA from Louisiana State University. Ms. Hatley plans to use her Writer’s Award to cover living expenses during the next year so she can write fulltime and complete her novel. She lives in Memphis, Tennessee. LADEE HUBBARD is also a fiction writer; she attended a Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops in 2008. Her vibrant, smart, and funny first novel tells the story of the Ribkins family, each member of which is born with a unique talent: one can see in the dark, one can pick any lock, another can make intricate maps from memory of anything he sees. Ms. Hubbard says, “Riffing on W. E. B. Dubois’s famous essay about the need to cultivate a black leadership class, The Talented Tenth, is structured as a road novel that combines elements of the picaresque and the noble quest. The book is conceived as an allegory of African American life during the second half of the twentieth century and looks at the meaning of talent, its relation to notions of African American mobility, and its role in the mediation of responsibility to a wider community.” “It is an amazing book,” says her nominator. “Inventive and surreal but edged with truth and real pain.” Ms. Hubbard’s [End Page 764] work has appeared in the Beloit Fiction Journal, Crab Orchard Review, and others, and she has received fellowships from the Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops, and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Ms. Hubbard received a BA from Princeton, an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, a PhD from UCLA, and most recently an MFA in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her Writer’s Award will allow her to take time off from teaching, pay for child care, and devote her full attention to completing her novel. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana, with her husband and three...