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“Un-American”, “Conjure”, and “The Age of Phillis” Longlisted for 2021 PEN Book Awards

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We congratulate Hafizah Geter, Rae Armantrout, and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, who are all Longlisted for awards from PEN America.

PEN Open Book Longlist covers

Hafizah Geter’s debut poetry collection, Un-American, is Longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award. The PEN Open Book Award honors a work of fiction, literary nonfiction, biography/memoir, or poetry written by an author of color. The award was created by PEN America’s Open Book Committee, a group committed to racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.

Geter’s collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The daughter of a Nigerian Muslim woman and a former Southern Baptist black man, Geter charts the history of a black family of mixed citizenships through poems imbued by migration, racism, queerness, loss, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you.

PEN/Voelcker Award Longlist book covers

We are also pleased to announce that Rae Armantrout’s Conjure and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s The Age of Phillis are both Longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. The PEN/Voelcker Award honors a distinguished collection of poetry that represents a notable and accomplished literary presence.

Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. In Conjure that pleasure is matched by dread; fascination meets fear as the poet considers an increasingly toxic world.

The Age of Phillis, by award-winning writer Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, imagines the life and times of Wheatley: her childhood in the Gambia, West Africa, her life with her white American owners, her friendship with Obour Tanner, and her marriage to the enigmatic John Peters. Woven throughout are poems about Wheatley’s “age”—the era that encompassed political, philosophical, and religious upheaval, as well as the transatlantic slave trade.

From PEN America’s press release:

The Longlists for its 2021 Literary Awards span 11 book awards and encompassing more than 125 writers and translators, representing the year’s most extraordinary literary talents. Over 80 judges have selected the Longlists, which are made up of categories including the novel, short story collection, translation, poetry, science writing, essay, biography, and more. (Read the full release here.)

Finalists for PEN America Literary Awards will be announced in February 2021.

Announcing “Un-American”

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Dancing between lyric and narrative, Hafizah Geter’s debut collection moves readers through the fraught internal and external landscapes—linguistic, cultural, racial, familial—of those whose lives are shaped and transformed by immigration. The Nigerian-born daughter of a Nigerian-Muslim woman and a Black man born into a Southern Baptist family in the Jim Crow South and George Wallace’s Alabama, Geter charts the history of a Black family of mixed citizenships through poems complicated by migration, language, racism, queerness, loss, belief and lapsed faith, and the heartbreak of trying to feel at home in a country that does not recognize you. Amidst considerations of family and country, Geter weaves in testimonies for Black victims of police brutality, songs of lament that hone each tragedy and like Antigone, demand we bear intimate witness to the ethical failings of the state. Through her mother’s death and her father’s illnesses, we witness Geter lace the natural world into the discourse of grief, human interactions, and socio-political discord in a collection rich with unflinching intimacy that, turning outward to face the country, examines how all of this is, like the speaker herself, stretched between the context of two nations. This collection that thrums with authenticity and heart.

“Hafizah Geter’s Un-American reads like a high lyric conversation overheard. Poem after poem, the most ordinary of items—cups, cards, couches—get ratcheted up into their proper glory. In other words, Geter sees the world as a stage set for what she needs to tell her family but can’t, what she needs to hear from her family but won’t. And all of this is done with attention to what this one beautiful story says about the so-called American story.”
—Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition

“Here is the history of this country in all its blood and complication, with all its promise and betrayal. These poems are an accounting, a testimony, a prayer—poems meant to quiet the animal inside us. A beautiful book.”
—Nick Flynn, author of I Will Destroy You

“In Un-American, Hafizah Geter creates a new kind of portraiture. A family is slowly etched in relief in language both lush and exacting. This gorgeous debut troubles and reshapes notions of belonging against the backdrop of a country obsessed with its own exclusions, erasures, borders, institutions, and violence. Geter’s poems simmer original forms of witness and resistance.”
—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

HAFIZAH GETER, born in Zaria, Nigeria, is an author and editor whose poetry and prose have appeared in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Longreads, among others. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.