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The Eleventh Annual Asian American Literary Awards Fiction Award Winner for Asian American Excellence in 2007 In his second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist , Moshin Hamid charts the disillusionment of a young Pakistani in New York, a Princeton graduate employed by an elite Manhattan firm, whose life starts to unravel after the attacks on the Twin Towers. Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1971, Hamid attended Princeton and Harvard Law School and worked for several years in New York and Lahore. He published his first novel, Moth Smoke in 2000, and lives in London. Judge's citation: The novel's premise is immediately provocative: Changez, a seemingly gregarious Pakistani, invites a dubious American stranger to sit down with him at a Lahore café so he can explain his journey from Princeton graduate and member of the Manhattan financing elite to his current ambiguous life in Pakistan. Exploring the emotional aftermath of 9/11, author Hamid sustains the tension of this unsettling, but compelling perspective through lean, yet sharpened prose. The controlled first person monologue could become tedious if it wasn't for the powerful nuances in Changez's conflicted feelings over the political turmoil now infecting every facet of his once promising life in America. Given the minimalist prose, it is admirable how every character, from his colleagues at the valuation firm and Erica, his privileged, haunted love interest, to his concerned family members in Pakistan, is patiently developed, enabling readers to understand how anguished, yet inevitable, Changez's political rebirth truly is. Fiction Award Finalists Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero (Vintage) Michael Ondaatje's Divisadero opens in 1970s Northern California and then bifurcates intriguingly to the poker-playing backrooms of Nevada and pre-World War 1 Southern France. The multilayered novel is the fifth from the Sri Lankan-born Toronto-based bestselling author of The English Patient . Judge's citation: Ondaatje's writing challenges received identity categories even as his latest offering, Divisadero, registers his longstanding fascination with identity's displacement that is characteristically postcolonial and ethnically textured. With Divisadero, the locations from which identity is unmoored are the American West and southern France, its minority subjects Chicana and gypsy--oppositely New and Old World figures manifesting resonantly similar relationships to the land that are all the more intimate and powerful for their cultural exclusions from the nation. With Ondaatje, the thematic and topical purview of literature written by Asians in the Americas is continually extended, ceaselessly revising what we might entertain as relevant to Asian American literary imagination. --Colleen Lye, University of California at Berkeley, author of America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 Yuko Taniguchi, The Ocean in the Closet (Coffee House Press) The Ocean in the Closet is a story of hope and redemption about a nine-year old girl in San Francisco who reaches out into the past to understand the pain and suffering endured by previous generations of her family. This is the first novel from Yuko Taniguchi, author of the acclaimed book of poetry Foreign Wife Elegy. A native of Yokohama, Japan, she arrived in the United States at the age of fifteen and now lives in Minnesota.
--Aimee Phan, author of 2005 Asian American Literary Award Fiction Finalist We Should Never Meet , California College of the Arts. Note: Jack Tchen, Director of the NYU Asian Pacific American Center, also served as a judge for fiction category of the Eleventh Annual Asian American Literary Awards.
Nonfiction Award Winner for Asian American Excellence in 2007 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World (The New Press) The Darker Nations traces the birth of postcolonial nations after World War II and the eventual demise of the Third World, offering an incisive alternate account of the latter half of the twentieth century. The author Vijay Prashad is the Professor of South Asian History and director of international studies at Trinity College, Connecticut. His previous work includes The Karma of Brown Folk and Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts. Judge's citation: In The Darker Nations , Vijay Prashad reintroduces the reader to the political struggle of colonial and postcolonial nations in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on the Bandung Conference of 1955, Prashad argues that the emergence of a Third World movement in the aftermath of that conference--a movement that scholars frequently dismiss as short-lived, utopic, and limited to the global South--in fact enables us to reinterpret the history and politics of the Cold War. This is a study that showcases brilliant archival research that, in turn, rethinks the divide between North and South, First and Third Worlds, and colonial and post-colonial eras. Prashad provides us with a fresh perspective on the transnational collaborations that produced revolutionary enthusiasm in the mid-twentieth century, and incisively details the tragedy that befalls nationalist and collective aspirations over the next fifty years. His vision for The Darker Nations is never myopic, always critical, and at this turning point in global social and political relations, still provides a sense of hope. --Bakirathi Mani, Swarthmore College Nonfiction Award Finalists Bich Minh Nguyen, Stealing Buddha's Dinner (Viking) Bich Minh Nguyen's first book is a memoir about growing up in a Vietnamese household in the mostly white town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Nguyen's family fled Vietnam on the night before the city of Saigon fell in April 1975, the year after she was born. She graduated from the University of Michigan and currently teaches creative nonfiction, fiction and Asian American Literature at Purdue University. Judge's citation: Bich Minh Nguyen's delightful and engaging memoir, Stealing Buddha's Dinner , transports readers back to Michigan in the '70s and '80s, where the author's family relocated as refugees from Vietnam. Nguyen's account, mainly drawn from her experiences as a child, takes the reader on a fascinating journey into the mind of a bright and observant child, eager to make sense of the Midwestern American world and the unusual family circumstances in which she finds herself. Nguyen expresses her desire for acceptance and belonging through her fascination with American food and pop culture and her connections to family and Vietnamese culture through her appetite for her grandmother's cooking. But far from being a predictable story of angst and assimilation, Nguyen's writing is rich and descriptive and full of insight about growing up Asian in a predominantly white town, grappling with complicated family relationships, and learning from the experiences of other ethnic groups about resistance and pride. The account is at once fun and readable, but also sharp and serious, and with plenty of ups and downs on the emotional rollercoaster. --Theresa Mah, Assistant Director for Curriculum and Learning, Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, University of Chicago Atul Gawande, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (Metropolitan Books) In his collection of essays, Better , surgeon-author Atul Gawande illuminates the medical and ethical dilemmas faced by his profession with personal experiences. A 2006 McArthur fellow, Gawande is a general surgeon at the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. He is also a staff writer for The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New England Journal of Medicine. His first collection of essays, entitled Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science , was nominated for a 2002 National Book Award. Judge's citation: In Atul Gawande's Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance , the talented writer and surgeon has crafted meditations that explore the less glamorous aspects of medicine: the balance between modesty and necessity in physical examinations; the pricetag of removing a bunion versus an entire lung; or the defacto trend toward a Caesarian surgery for childbirth. Gawande writes not only for those interested in medicine and health policy but for all readers--anyone interested in understanding the mental wear-and-tear of U.S. Army surgeons doing "War Rounds" for injured soldiers fighting the Iraqi War, or the growing pains of Dr. Harris Berman, a surgeon-turned-CEO of a grassroots, New Hampshire-based, HMO. Better is an accomplished, wide-ranging collection of essays that cements Gawande's reputation as a writer of exceptional talent and authority. --Ricco Villanueva Siasoco, Boston College, PEN/New England Discovery recipient Poetry Award Winner for Asian American Excellence in 2007 Sun Yung Shin, Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press) In Skirt Full of Black , Korean-American writer Sun Yung Shin gives voice to the growing number of transnational adoptees, employing techniques of poetics and collage and drawing from Catholic and Buddhist myths. Shin was born in Seoul and grew up as the adopted child of a Catholic-American family in Chicago. Her previous work includes Cooper's Lesson , a children's book, and Outsider's Within , the first anthology of writings by transcultural adoptees. She lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the Perpich Center for Arts Education. Judge's citation: Sun Yung Shin's restlessly rewoven skirt full of black-inked imagos is exhaustively exhilarating and exasperating, unfurled across the semiotic viscera of what Karatani Kojin has decried as the trinity of country, state, and economic miracle. Reaggregating any tiny, scattered "wings & legs still grinding, spinning," a bereaved, but emboldened sense of diaspora invades every letter of the systems the book addresses--it is impossible afterward to "chew with your words closed." Amidst her face-to-fable, heel-to-foe mouthing and mauling of many levels of social transcription, Shin reanimates our picture of language as a mutual conjugation and fleeing of "the hunter and hunted" caught in utterance's ring of fire, its smoldering ortho-graphs. Stripped from the bark of re-quested genealogies, everywhere "split into a plurality," each page is a montaged mons publica of the whirled-to-come. --Professor Walter K. Lew, University of Miami, editor of Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry Poetry Award Finalists Rita Wong, Forage (Nightwood Editions) In her new collection of poetry, Forage , Rita Wong explores the relationship of our ecological crises to the political injustices of the world today. Wong's previous collection, Monkeypuzzle received the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer Award. She teaches in the Critical and Cultural Studies program at Emily Carr Institute of Art and design and is also a visiting instructor at the University of Miami. Judge's citation: With linguistic alliteration and alteration, Forage urgently forages through the strands of ecological, political, and economic crisis at the turn of the new millennium to produce, like the genetically engineered food it alludes to, poems that are experimental mutations for our consumption. This consumption produces--forges--an ethics that comprehends humans as creatures not only of nature, but also of language and technology. Provocative and playful, astute and energizing, Forage is an important contribution to poetry and to critical thought. --Professor Juliana Chang, University of Santa Clara, editor of Quiet Fire: A Historical Anthology of Asian American Poetry, 1892-1970 Sarith Peou, Corpse Watching (Tin Fish Press) Corpse Watching is a chapbook of poems offering witness to the genocidal crimes of the Khmer Rouge in late 1970s Cambodia. The poems were written by Sarith Peou in a prison in Minnesota, where he is still serving out his time. Born in 1962, Peou fled his native Cambodia in 1982 and settled in the United States five years later. He moved to Minnesota in 1993 and is currently completing his autobiography, tentatively titled Prison Without Walls . Judge's citation: This book is literally and literarily riveting. It is a flipbook of mugshots. It is a gathering of elegies drifting down a stream of war-time atrocities. Necessary and urgent, there is nothing remotely academic about this collection, a book composed in a stateside prison where our immigrant poet remains. --Poet Timothy Liu, William Paterson University, author of For Dust Thou Art and Vox Angelica
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