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DTSTART;TZID=America/Denver:20240425T160000
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DTSTAMP:20260502T063123
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UID:10000743-1714060800-1714068000@www.aspenwords.org
SUMMARY:AWLP Ceremony Watch Party: Pitkin County Library
DESCRIPTION:Please RSVP here! \nPitkin County Library is delighted to once again host a free livestream viewing party of the Aspen Words Literary Prize Awards Ceremony taking place at the Morgan Library in New York City on Thursday\, April 25th. The event will be held in the Library’s Dunaway Community Room and doors will open at 4:00pm\, with the livestream beginning at 4:30pm. \nThe finalists for the $35\,000 Aspen Words Literary Prize\, which honors a work of fiction that illuminates vital contemporary issues\, are: \n“Chain-Gang All-Stars” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah \n“Temple Folk” by Aaliyah Bilal \n“Witness” by Jamel Brinkley \n“Enter Ghost” by Isabella Hammad \n“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride \n  \nAttendees at the Library’s viewing party will be able to delight in the evening’s most exciting aspects in real-time: a conversation with the finalist authors led by Mary Louise Kelly co-host of NPR’s award-winning show All Things Considered\, and the live announcement of the $35\,000 prize winner. \nRefreshments will be served and prizes will be awarded for those who correctly guess the winning book.
URL:https://www.aspenwords.org/events/awlp-ceremony-watch-party-pitkin-county-library/
LOCATION:Colorado
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Denver:20240425T183000
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DTSTAMP:20260502T063123
CREATED:20240110T194816Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20240410T181020Z
UID:10000728-1714069800-1714077000@www.aspenwords.org
SUMMARY:Aspen Words Literary Prize Ceremony
DESCRIPTION:A conversation with the prize finalists and announcement of the 2024 winner. \nDetails: \nMorgan Library & Museum \n225 Madison Ave.\, New York\, NY 10016 \nProgram: 6:30-7:30 p.m. ET \n& Livestreamed! \nFREE Registration:  \nhttps://support.aspeninstitute.org/event/2024-aspen-words-literary-prize-ceremony/e568007/register/new/select-tickets \nFinalists: \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \nLoretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars\, the cornerstone of CAPE\, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment\, a highly popular\, highly controversial\, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom. In CAPE\, prisoners travel as Links in Chain-Gangs\, competing in death-matches for packed arenas with righteous protestors at the gates. Thurwar and Staxxx\, both teammates and lovers\, are the fan favorites. And if all goes well\, Thurwar will be free in just a few matches\, a fact she carries as heavily as her lethal hammer. As she prepares to leave her fellow Links\, she considers how she might help preserve their humanity\, in defiance of these so-called games\, but CAPE’s corporate owners will stop at nothing to protect their status quo and the obstacles they lay in Thurwar’s path have devastating consequences.  Moving from the Links in the field to the protestors to the CAPE employees and beyond\, Chain-Gang All-Stars is a kaleidoscopic\, excoriating look at the American prison system’s unholy alliance of systemic racism\, unchecked capitalism and mass incarceration and a clear-eyed reckoning with what freedom in this country really means.  \nPantheon – Random House \nNana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is the New York Times-bestselling author of  Friday Black. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review\, Esquire\, The Paris Review and elsewhere. He was a National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honoree\, the winner of the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the Saroyan Prize\, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for Best First Book\, along with many other honors. Raised in Spring Valley\, New York\, he now lives in the Bronx. \n  \n \nIn Temple Folk\, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race\, religion\, economics\, politics and sexuality in America. The 10 stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born. With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do\, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion\, nuance and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for\, it’s the errors that make us human.  \nSimon & Schuster \nAaliyah Bilal was born and raised in Prince George’s County\, Maryland. She has degrees from Oberlin College and the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies. She’s published stories and essays with The Michigan Quarterly Review and The Rumpus. Temple Folk is her first short story collection. \n \nWhat does it mean to really see the world around you—to bear witness? And what does it cost us\, both to see and not to see? In these ten stories\, each set in the changing landscapes of contemporary New York City\, a range of characters—from children to grandmothers to ghosts—live through the responsibility of perceiving and the moral challenge of speaking up or taking action. Though they strive to connect with\, stand up for\, care for and remember one another\, they often fall short and the structures they build around these ambitions and failures shape their futures as well as the legacies and prospects of their communities and their city. In its portraits of families and friendships lost and found\, the paradox of intimacy\, the long shadow of grief and the meaning of home\, Witness enacts its own testimony. Here is a world where fortunes can be made and stolen in just a few generations\, where strangers might sometimes show kindness while those we trust—doctors\, employers\, siblings—too often turn away\, where joy comes in snatches: flowers on a windowsill\, dancing in the street\, glimpsing your purpose\, change on the horizon.  \nFarrar\, Straus and Giroux – Macmillan \nJamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories\, which won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and was a finalist for the National Book Award\, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction\, the Story Prize\, the John Leonard Prize\, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. He has also been awarded an O. Henry Prize\, the Rome Prize\, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship\, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. His work has appeared in The Paris Review\, A Public Space\, Ploughshares and The Best American Short Stories. He was raised in the Bronx and in Brooklyn\, New York\, and currently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. \n \nAfter years away from her family’s homeland\, and healing from an affair with an established director\, stage actress Sonia Nasir returns to Palestine to visit her older sister Haneen. Though the siblings grew up spending summers at their family home in Haifa\, Sonia hasn’t been since the second intifada and the deaths of her grandparents. While Haneen stayed and made a life commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university\, Sonia remained in London to focus on her burgeoning acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return\, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile\, both bone-deep and new. \nOnce at Haneen’s\, Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam\, a local director\, and finds herself roped into a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon\, Sonia is rehearsing Gertude’s lines in Classical Arabic and spending more time in Ramallah than in Haifa with a dedicated group of men from all over historic Palestine who\, in spite of competing egos and priorities\, each want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer it becomes clear just how many invasive and violent obstacles stand before a troupe of Palestinian actors. Amidst it all\, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting\, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home. \nA stunning rendering of present-day Palestine\, Enter Ghost is a story of diaspora\, displacement\, and the connection to be found in family and shared resistance. Timely\, thoughtful\, and passionate\, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite feat\, an unforgettable story of artistry under occupation. \nGrove Press – Grove Atlantic \nIsabella Hammad is the author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review\, The Nation\, Granta\, Conjunctions\, and elsewhere. She was awarded the Plimpton Prize\, an O. Henry Award\, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters\, the Palestine Book Award and a Betty Trask Award\, and her work has been supported by the Lannan Foundation and Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination. \n \nIn 1972\, when workers in Pottstown\, Pennsylvania\, were digging the foundations for a new development\, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill\, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him\, it was Chona and Nate Timblin\, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill\, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen\, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white\, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it\, McBride shows us that even in dark times\, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.  \nRiverhead Books – Penguin Random House \nJames McBride is the author of the New York Times–bestselling Oprah’s Book Club selection Deacon King Kong\, the National Book Award–winning The Good Lord Bird\, the American classic The Color of Water\, the novels Song Yet Sung and Miracle at St. Anna\, the story collection Five-Carat Soul\, and Kill ’Em and Leave\, a biography of James Brown. The recipient of a National Humanities Medal and an accomplished musician\, McBride is also a distinguished writer in residence at New York University. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nModerator: \nMary Louise Kelly is a host of “All Things Considered\,” NPR’s award-winning afternoon newsmagazine. Previously\, she spent a decade as national security correspondent for NPR News\, and she’s kept that focus in her role as anchor. That’s meant taking “All Things Considered” to Russia\, North Korea\, Iran and beyond. \nShe’s published two novels\, “Anonymous Sources” and “The Bullet\,” as well as the New York Times bestselling memoir\, “It. Goes. So. Fast. The Year of No Do-Overs.” Her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times\, among other publications\, and she serves as a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
URL:https://www.aspenwords.org/events/aspen-words-literary-prize-ceremony/
LOCATION:Colorado
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