Announcing Kimbilio’s Book Prizes!

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Kimbilio is proud to announce an incredible addition to our programming. Partnering with our friends at Four Way Books and Braddock Avenue Books, Kimbilio will be awarding two annual publication prizes.

Published by Four Way Books, The Kimbilio National Fiction Prize will be a celebration and affirmation of the best in contemporary fiction. 2017 judge Edwidge Danticat will make the final selection of an outstanding novel or collection of short stories, which will be published in the spring of 2019. The competition is open to writers of the African Diaspora.

Four Way Books is dedicated to producing and promoting excellent literary publications and to creating opportunities for writers of merit. We believe that the work of writers brings good to the world—understanding, empathy, curiosity, wisdom—and that if we can be the conduit for connecting writers and readers, for making a writer’s life more meaningful by bringing validation to the artist and fine work to public attention, we are spending our days nobly.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the United States when she was twelve. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; and The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner for The Dew Breaker. Danticat’s honors include the National Book Critics Circle Award, for Brother, I’m Dying and she was a National Book Award finalist; Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the inaugural Story Prize. She is also a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship.

Information about the Kimbilio National Fiction Prize can be found at this link: The Kimbilio National Fiction Prize

We are also proud to announce Opo: a Kimbilio/Braddock Avenue Books Collaborative Publishing. Opo is the Yoruba word for “abundance” and this collaboration celebrates the richness and range of narrative prose from the African Diaspora. The annual series will alternate between under-published and underappreciated genres and forms not often associated with writers of the diaspora. The 2017 competition focuses on speculative fiction. Victor LaValle will select the winning manuscript.

Braddock Avenue Books was created to provide a forum for devoted writers who want to resist the glib, the superficial, and the banal. In a word, when “edginess” becomes a fashion statement and “experimental” looks like a gimmick, it is time to take a stand. Braddock Avenue Books is willing to fight the good fight by publishing books with heart and soul.

Victor LaValle is the award-winning author of slapboxing with jesus, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, Lucretia and the Kroons, The Devil in Silver, and The Ballad of Black Tom. His forthcoming novel, The Changeling, will be published in June 2017. He has been awarded the American Book Award, the Ernest J. Gaines Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship among others. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York with his family.

Information on the Opo Book Prize can be found at this link: Opo: The Kimbilio/Braddock Avenue Book Prize Series

Both prizes include publication, a $1000 honorarium, an appearance at Kimbilio/Litfest at SMU, and promotional support from Jack Jones Literary Arts.

Kimbilio is a national community of writers dedicated to Extending, Nurturing, and Sustaining a Community of Writers from the African Diaspora. Projects include readings, presentations at professional conferences, social media networking, and an annual summer retreat for fiction writers who are members of the Kimbilio community. Keep up to date with Kimbilio by subscribing to our blog and email blasts. Kimbilio is a project of the English Department at SMU.

Founded in March 2015, Jack Jones Literary Arts‘s mission is to provide publicity services and support for writers who are unafraid and to announce their work to audiences who seek literary art that is unorthodox, underappreciated, and unparalleled.