A woman raised on a yacht in the South Pacific, a teacher of “narrative medicine,” a poet inspired by ancient nautical technologies, a former defender of murderers, a resident of a Georgia small town that was once home to the largest asylum in the world, and a Virgin Islands native are all recipients of the Rona Jaffe Foundation’s annual Writers Awards. The writers will each receive $25,000 and be honored at a ceremony on September 23 in New York City.
Since 1995, the Foundation, created by novelist Rona Jaffe to identify and support women writers early in the careers, has awarded more than $1 million. The 2010 winners—Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams, Rachel Aviv, Sara Elizabeth Johnson, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Laura Newbern, and Tiphanie Yanique—represent the areas of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. They join past winners such as Eula Biss, Kathleen Graber, Julia Slavin, and Julia Whitty.
Three of the winners are writing nonfiction. Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams is writing a memoir, The Following Sea, that explores the lives of her parents, who raised her on a yacht in the South Pacific. Rachel Aviv, who has taught classes on narrative medicine, is working on a book about adolescents and young adults in the pre-stages of schizophrenia. And Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, who holds a J.D. from Harvard Law School, is working on her first book, Any One of Us, a personal narrative that combines memoir with an inquiry into a murder and the murderer’s past.
Two more winners are working on poetry. Sara Elizabeth Johnson is writing her first collection of poems, Vessel, which is inspired by “ancient and medieval nautical, cartographic, and navigational technologies”; and Laura Newbern, an associate professor of English at Georgia College & State University, has tentatively titled her new manuscript Nightfall.
Finally, a novelist from the Virgin Islands, Tiphanie Yanique, is working on The Novel of Love, which evokes the mystery of the Caribbean.
