The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University has announced the eight winners of this year’s Windham-Campbell Prizes in the fields of fiction, nonfiction, drama, and poetry. Each winner will receive a $165,000 prize at an international literary festival at Yale in September.
Six of the eight winners of this year Windham-Campbell Prizes are women. Three have ties to academic institutions in the United States.
Lorna Goodison, a winner of a poetry prize, is a professor emerita at the University of Michigan, where she served as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afro-American studies. She currently serves as poet laureate of the nation of Jamaica. Professor Goodison has published 13 collections of poetry including Supplying Salt and Light (McClelland & Stewart, 2013).
Cathy Park Hong also won a Windham-Campbell Prize in poetry. A native of Los Angeles, she is the author of three collections of poetry including Engine Empire (W.W. Norton & Company, 2012). Professor Hong teaches in master of fine arts degree program in creative writing at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey. Professor Hong is a graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio and holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from the Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.
Suzan-Lori Parks won an award in the drama category. She is a professor of creative writing at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Parks is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She is a former MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” winner. Professor Parks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her play “Topdog/Underdog.” In addition to her plays, Parks is the author of the novel Getting Mother’s Body (2003).
The other women winners are all from the United Kingdom: Sarah Bakewell, Olivia Liang, and Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi.