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Leslie Jamison wins Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize
February 6, 2012—The
Empathy Exams: Essays on Pain by 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 essays in 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.
Robert
Polito, well-regarded author and Director of the Graduate
Writing Program at the New School in New York, served as the outside judge for
the contest.
“The Empathy Exams is a book of surprises, and those surprises are
so smart, so elegantly arranged, and so various that you almost forget, for
instance, that Leslie Jamison’s subject is pain, the root human
subject that (of course) you
almost can never forget; and her mind is so quicksilver alert, her materials so
volatile, that you might also miss her poise, stamina, and authority,” said
Polito. “Operating at the edges of articulation, and whether essays or memoir,
a sly circuit through self or otherness, an anatomy of imagination or
devastations, this is nonfiction of the most stylish and audacious sort.”
Leslie
Jamison, 28, was thrilled with the news. “These essays are the
product of years of thinking and writing and rethinking and rewriting, and I'm
honored to be working with Graywolf to bring them into a fully-realized
collection,” she said. “I still remember where I was walking when I heard the
news—in a public green, beside a dirty fountain—and the feeling I had in that
moment: that the world felt full of possibility and enchantment. I'd just been
given the chance, by this wonderful press, to become part of an extraordinary
community of writers and readers.”
Previous winners of the prize include The Grey Album: On the Blackness of
Blackness by Kevin Young; Notes from
No Man’s Land: American Essays by Eula Biss, which won the National Book
Critics Circle Award; Black Glasses Like
Clark Kent: A GI’s Secret from Postwar Japan by Terese Svoboda; Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by
Ander Monson; and Frantic Transmissions
to and from Los Angeles by Kate Braverman. Graywolf’s editors and Polito
will consider submissions for the next Nonfiction Prize in August 2012.
About
Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at
Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has also worked as an
innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and
an office temp in Manhattan. She is currently a PhD candidate at Yale
University, where she is writing a dissertation on poverty and degradation in
twentieth-century American writing. Her first novel, The Gin Closet, was published in 2010.
About
Robert Polito
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, and critic.
His most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God, and The
Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber. Other books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson,
which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography; Doubles; and A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover.
The recipient of Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim fellowships, Robert Polito is
the Director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York.
The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is funded in part by endowed
gifts from the Arsham Ohanessian Charitable Remainder
Unitrust and the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation.
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