Poet Ishion Hutchinson, assistant professor of English, and novelist Emily Fridlund, visiting scholar in the Department of English, have each received Literature Awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The awards will be presented in New York City at the Academy’s annual Ceremonial in May.
Hutchinson was awarded one of eight Arts and Letters Awards in honor of exceptional accomplishment in literature. The award includes a $10,000 prize. Hutchinson’s second poetry collection, “House of Lords and Commons,” won the National Book Critics Circle Award; his “Far District: Poems” won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award. Other honors include a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner Journal and the Academy of American Poets’ Larry Levis Prize. His works have appeared in several anthologies and journals such as Poetry, The Common, Poetry Review (UK), Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Narrative, Granta, The Huffington Post and New Letters. He is a contributing editor to the literary journal, Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
Fridlund received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction for her debut novel, “History of Wolves,” published in 2017. The award includes a $5,000 prize.
A former postdoctoral associate in the Department of English, Fridlund was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for “History of Wolves.” Her first novel was also a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and a winner of the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. Her recently published collection of stories, “Catapult,” won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. Her creative work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, New Orleans Review, and Southwest Review. Fridlund received an MFA in fiction at Washington University in Saint Louis and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California in 2014. Her graduate research was a study of simultaneity in modernist and contemporary narrative.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters was founded in 1898 as an honor society of the country’s leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. Early members include William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Julia Ward Howe, Henry James, Edward MacDowell, Theodore Roosevelt, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John Singer Sargent, and Edith Wharton.
