2009 Beyond Margins Awards

Sponsored by the Open Book Program, the PEN/Beyond Margins Award celebrates outstanding books by writers of color published in the United States during the previous year. The Beyond Margins Award is one of the many ways in which the Open Book Program encourages racial and ethnic diversity within the literary and publishing communities.

>> See listings from the complete winners archive

>> Listen to audio from Crossing Over: The 2009 Beyond Margins Celebration

Say You're One of Them
by Uwem Akpan

One time we couldn’t even go to school, because rashes broke out all over us like a fine spray of goose bumps, and Fofo Kpee got us efun, the local calamine chalk, soaked it in water, and poured it all over our bodies. We moved around the house like little masqueraders. During the day, Fofo encouraged us to play outside the house, saying it would make the infection heal faster. Yet at night, when we needed air the most, he would sigh, lock us in, and tell us that men who would succeed in life knew how to take pain. [More]

Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems by Juan Felipe Herrera His eyeteeth clap like his family for an encore of southwest earth wolfed with fever … Skilled and styled to believe that Moctezuma blood & spirit … are dead, as he pumps a book through his ears. [More]

AUDIO
• Listen to Juan Felipe Herrera read from Half of the World in Light


Changing
by Lily Hoang

Us lovers with our fear of contentment like you lover like your parents & me lover like my parents the way our parents lover our families are content the way they sit in front of their dinners in front of their televisions & they don’t talk lover they don’t say words to each other because lover there is a comfort in their contentment there is a sadness & that’s what us lovers fear most like how we have dinner & we don’t talk & how we television instead of speak silence. [More]