Research & Innovation

The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers has selected its sixteenth class of Fellows: fifteen extraordinarily talented independent scholars, academics, and creative writers whose work will benefit directly from access to the collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

A vivarium is an enclosure for living things -- plants or animals -- which might likewise be said of a poem. With a vivacious sensibility and unruly leaps from elegiac to ironic, Sajé's new book is an abecedarium, fully using the page, and challenging all manner of received wisdom. Employing lyrics, lists, arguments, narratives, and meditations, and including prose poems devoted to particular letters as well as invented visual or conceptual pieces, in Vivarium the alphabet is endowed with power far beyond usefulness. Form breathes life in this book, and the lived emotion of these poems defies death.

A work eligible for the 2021 award will have been published in calendar year 2019 or 2020. To be eligible for the award, a nominee must be a member of CCCC and/or NCTE at the time of nomination. To nominate a publication for the award, the author, editor, publisher, or reader must be a CCCC and/or NCTE member.

Studies in Philology 110, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 266–90, DOI: 10.1353/sip.2013.0011.

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Kara Candito’s second poetry collection is anything but a comedy, although it ends happily. At the book’s center is the struggle of a U.S. citizen and a Mexican citizen to find a common space and language in their relationship while navigating the U.S. immigration system, a process that sometimes requires magical thinking just to endure. By employing a kind of documentary poetics that views the application process through different angles and perspectives, Candito crafts discourses around xenophobia, otherness, and national and ethnic identity.

“In the waiting room of the third government office, / you will invent your own religion,” writes Candito in “Ars Amatoria: So You Want to Marry a Foreign National,” a tragicomic sequence written in Roman-numeric fragments reminiscent of an official document’s formatting. Interspersed with moments of lyric urgency (“I am here / to learn how to suffer more beautifully”) and disconcerting cinematic observation (“One wore an assault rifle across his back, // another pointed a video camera at our faces.”), Spectator charts the plural self’s course through a world of airplane travel, drug wars, and customs forms.

From Italy to Boston, from Lorca’s Granada to New York City, and from the dusty streets of Mexico City to the snowy parking lots of the Midwest, the speakers of Spectator probe the jagged boundaries between past and present, observer and observed, and political and personal. The book becomes an homage to anyone who’s been displaced or redefined by bureaucratic systems of power.

The Other Blacklist explores the impact of the Left, the Communist Party, and the U.S. government spying operations on African American literature and culture during the Cold War.  Focused on six major African American writers and artists of the 1950s, this study shows how their Left affiliations enabled them to shape an aesthetic that maintained traditions of race radicalism and literary experimentation.

The Cambridge History of Gay and Lesbian Literature presents a global history of the field and is an unprecedented summation of critical knowledge on gay and lesbian literature that also addresses the impact of gay and lesbian literature on cognate fields such as comparative literature and postcolonial studies.

Avilez analyzes the suspenseful novel portraying a community–and a family–under siege, during the shocking string of murders of black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s.

Black Gay Genius looks back at the 1980s, but also looks forward, seeking to build upon the artistic and political legacy of black gay men’s from the 1980s.

“When I say, as I occasionally have, that Thibault Raoult is the Capablanca of our moment in poetry, I don’t mean just that he’s irritatingly debonair, but that he can see the move that rips through settled understandings."