Rona Jaffe Winners Honored

September 30, 2009

Rona Jaffe Winners Honored

The winners of the 2009 Rona Jaffe Foundation prizes were honored last week at a private reception in New York City. Poet Elizabeth Alexander--she of Obama inauguration fame--was the featured guest.

You remember that you don't apply for one of the RJ's prestigious $25,000 awards; you are anonymously nominated. The money is intended to support exceptionally talented women writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry so that they can create time and space for writing.

Earlier, I enthused about poet Vievee Francis being chosen for this amazing award; I'm now in the process of discovering Lori Ostlund through her new short story collection, The Bigness of the World, which I'm reviewing for The Collagist. The book won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.

The other RJ winners include Krista Bremer, Janice N. Harrington, Helen Phillips, and Heidy Steidlymayer.

Image Credit: GalleyCat.

Posted at 12:34 PM in Literary Life, Poetry | Permalink

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