February 6, 2012—The
Empathy Exams: Essays on Painby Leslie Jamison has been chosen as the
newest winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Jamison will receive a
$12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish the collection of essaysin Fall 2013.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is designed to honor
and encourage the art of literary nonfiction, and is given to an outstanding
manuscript by an emerging author who has published no more than two previous
books of nonfiction. Last year’s winner, The
Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young, will be released
on March 13, 2012.
“Leslie Jamison is a bright young writer whose writing
embodies every element of the qualities we were searching for when selecting a
prize winner,” said Graywolf Press publisher and director Fiona McCrae. “These essays have content and style; reading them, you get the feeling that Jamison is a
writer on a literary adventure.”
The
Empathy Exams explores subjects as diverse as slum tourism, parasites,
medical acting, sentimentality, ultra-running, and drug wars through the lens
of pain. These essays swirl around the physicality of the body and churn
through cultural expectations to find a way to represent pain—and the
accompanying impulse of empathy—without distorting them through narrative
expression. Read more...
By Shona Ramaya "The author’s writing is
lucid, and each story is different enough to showcase the diversity of her
style….an emerging writer to watch." —Library Journal
By Tiphanie Yanique “I reached the end of How to Escape from a Leper Colony with the exhilarating sense that
I had been on the best kind of journey—not,
finally, to the Virgin Islands nor Trinidad nor Houston nor London, but to the imagination of a wonderfully
talented young writer who has many more stories to tell.”
By Tess Gallagher The long-awaited and resplendent new poetry collection by Tess
Gallagher, whose poems “are a gift of a poet’s heart and soul to her
readers” —Robert Coles
By Elizabeth Alexander
Now available: The bilingual Spanish/English edition of the bestselling chapbook, Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration
By Dana Gioia "Can Poetry Matter? is an important book, and anyone who professes to
care about the state of American poetry will have to take it into
account." —World Literature Today
Jamison has been chosen as the
newest winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Jamison will receive a
$12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish the collection of essays in Fall 2013.
