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Author and Illustrator Ashley Bryan Honored in New Penn Exhibit

Ashley Bryan, renowned author and illustrator, lived to create. And throughout his long life, he created much joy in the lives of others. Bryan — also a poet, painter, and a musician — brought the richness of African culture, the vibrance of Black American spirituality and tradition, and the lost voices of enslaved people, to books read by children and adults of all races. He is one of the main reasons a large body of children’s literature today is illustrated with people of color.

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Announcing the winners of the 2021 Whiting Awards

This evening, in a virtual ceremony, the Whiting Foundation announced the recipients of its 2021 Whiting Awards, which seek to “recognize excellence and promise in a spectrum of emerging talent.” These ten writers, working in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama, will each be awarded $50,000, prize money that the Whiting Foundation hopes will allow them to “devote themselves full-time to their own writing or to take bold new risks in their work.” Past Whiting Award winners include Colson Whitehead, Anne Boyer, Ocean Vuong, Mary Karr, Lydia Davis, Layli Long Soldier, Denis Johnson, Terrance Hayes, Ling Ma, Sigrid Nunez, and many others.

The 2021 Whiting Award winners are:

Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat (Fiction)
Tope Folarin, author of A Particular Kind of Black Man (Fiction)
Joshua Bennett, author of Being Property Once Myself (Nonfiction and Poetry)
Sarah Stewart Johnson, author of The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World (Nonfiction)
Marwa Helal, author of Invasive species (Poetry)
Ladan Osman, author of Exiles of Eden (Poetry)
Xandria Phillips, author of Hull (Poetry)
Jordan E. Cooper, author of Black Boy Fly (Drama)
Donnetta Lavinia Grays, author of Where We Stand (Drama)
Sylvia Khoury, author of Selling Kabul (Drama)

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