Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s melancholy and beautiful new
short-story collection (or novel-in-stories, if you prefer), Everything
Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club (Cinco Puntos Press),
is (not surprisingly) a finalist for two important literary awards.
Before discussing these two nominations, let’s
revisit Sáenz’s personal and literary history (taken from his official
biography):
Benjamin Alire Sáenz was
born in 1954 in Old Picacho, a small farming village outside of Las Cruces, New
Mexico, forty-two miles north of the U.S. / Mexico border. He was the fourth of
seven children and was brought up in a traditional Mexican-American Catholic
family. He entered the seminary in 1972, a decision that was as much political
as it was religious. After concluding his theological studies at the University
of Louvain, he was ordained a Catholic priest. Three and a half years later, he
left the priesthood.
At the age of 30, he
entered the University of Texas at El Paso. He later received a fellowship at
the University of Iowa. In 1988, he received a Wallace E. Stegner Fellowship in
poetry from Stanford University. In 1993, he returned to the border to teach in
the bilingual MFA program at UTEP.
Sáenz is the author of a
previous book of poetry, Calendar of Dust, which won an American Book
Award. Cinco Puntos published two of his other books of poetry called Elegies
in Blue and the now out of print, Dark and Perfect Angels. His most
recent book of poetry, The Book of What Remains, was published by Copper
Canyon Press in 2010.
He is the author of
numerous novels, books for children and young adults as well as a previous
collection of short stories. His award winning young adult novels are Sammy
& Juliana in Hollywood, He Forgot to Say Goodbye, and Last
Night I Sang to the Monster. His adult novels include Carry Me Like
Water, The House of Forgetting, In Perfect Light, and Names
on a Map.
NOW THE
NOMINATIONS FOR HIS NEW BOOK:
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction – The 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Judges
Walter Kirn, Nelly Rosario, and A.J. Verdelle have announced their list of five
finalists for the this year’s PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The winner will
be announced on March 19th, and the 33rd Annual PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Ceremony & Dinner will be held on Saturday, May 4th at 7 p.m. at the Folger
Shakespeare Library. Benjamin Alire Sáenz is a finalist for Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky
Club (Cinco Puntos
Press). For a complete list of the PEN/Faulkner finalists, visit here.
Lambda Literary Award – Finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards were announced
on March 6th by the Lambda Literary Foundation (LLF) in Los Angeles.
Books from major mainstream publishers, from academic presses, from both
long-established and new LGBT publishers, as well as from emerging
publish-on-demand technologies, make up the 687 submissions for the “Lammys.”
The finalists were selected from a record number of submissions, and, for the
first time, the judges were encouraged to choose more finalists in those
categories that drew a large number of submissions.
Now in their twenty-fifth
year, the Lambda Literary Awards celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay,
bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) writing for books published in 2012. Winners
will be announced during a ceremony on Monday evening, June 3rd in
New York. Details on the annual after-party location are forthcoming. For more
information and to buy tickets, please visit this link.
In the General Gay Fiction
category, ten finalists were named including Benjamin Alire Saenz’s Everything
Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (Cinco Puntos Press). For a complete
list of finalists, visit here.
I note that Sáenz is also a Lambda
Literary Awards finalist in the LGBT Children’s/Young Adult category for his book, Aristotle
and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe (Simon & Schuster/
Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers), which has already won the Pura
Belpré Author Award, the Stonewall Book Award for Children's and Young Adult
Literature, and was a Michael L. Printz Honor Book.
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