Prairie Schooner Announces 2013 Book Prize Winners

The winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in poetry is R.A. Villanueva for his manuscript Reliquaria. His writing has appeared in AGNI, Gulf Coast, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Bellevue Literary Review, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. A founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art, his honors include the 2013 Ninth Letter Literary Award for poetry, fellowships from Kundiman and The Asian American Literary Review, and scholarships from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. He is currently a Language Lecturer at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

The winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in fiction is Amina Gautier for her manuscript Now We Will Be Happy. She was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of the short story collection At-Risk (U of Georgia P), which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. More than seventy-five of her stories have been published or are forthcoming in journals such as Antioch Review, Callaloo, Chattahoochee Review, Crazyhorse, Glimmer Train, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, and Southern Review, among others. Her work has received scholarships and fellowships from the Breadloaf Writer's Conference, Callaloo Writer’s Conference, Hurston/Wright Foundation, Sewanee Writer’s Conference, and others, as well as artist grants from the Illinois Arts Council and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She received her B.A. and M.A. in English Literature from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania.

Both will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Their books will be available in September 2014.