The prestigious 2015 Pen Literary Award nominations were announced on Thursday, featuring several writers with Connecticut backgrounds.
The Pen American Center awards a total of $150,000 to writers, translators, and editors whose work distinguishes them among their peers. Categories range from new books to emerging writers to achievements in translation.
Several writers from Yale have earned the distinguished honor of being shortlisted, including David Bromwich, a professor at Yale. His collection Moral Imagination is nominated for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, which goes to "a book of essays published in 2014 that exemplifies the dignity and esteem that the essay form imparts to literature."
Also shortlisted is Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, a collection centered around her years as an actor for medical students. Jamison is a doctoral student at Yale University.
Yet another Yale graduate is nominated for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography. Jeff Hobbs in nominated for The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, the story of his college roommate who led a challenging dual life between his poverty-stricken community in Newark, New Jersey and the hallowed halls of Yale.
The final Connecticut nod lies with Elizabeth Kolbert, who also graduated from Yale University and is now a staff writer for The New Yorker. Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction is shortlisted for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.
The winners will be announced on May 13 and celebrated at the New School on June 8.
Julia Pistell is an intern at WNPR.
