Poetry Chair, 2018 - Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems, including A Doll For Throwing, Louise in Love, The Bride of E, The Last Two Seconds, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translation of Dante's Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher, was published by Graywolf Press. She has received a Hodder Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.
Ken Chen
Ken Chen
https://twitter.com/chen_ken
Ken Chen is the Executive Director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop. He received the Yale Younger Poets Award for his book Juvenilia. An NEA, NYFA and Bread Loaf fellow, Chen co-founded the cultural website Arts & Letters Daily and CultureStrike, a national arts organization dedicated to migrant justice. A graduate of Yale Law School, he successfully defended the asylum application of an undocumented Muslim high school student from Guinea detained by Homeland Security.
Elise Paschen
Elise Paschen
https://twitter.com/ElisePaschen
Elise Paschen is the author of The Nightlife, Bestiary, Infidelities, and Houses: Coasts. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker and Poetry Magazine, among other magazines, and in numerous anthologies. Former Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America, she is a co-founder of the Poetry in Motion program. A graduate of Harvard University and Oxford University, Paschen teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute and lives in Chicago with her family. Photo credit: Jennifer Girard
Stephen Sparks is co-owner of Point Reyes Books, an independent bookstore in Point Reyes Station, California. He is a board member of the Northern California Booksellers Association, a contributing editor at LitHub, and has served as a juror for the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Booksellers Association Indies Choice Book Awards, and other awards. His first book, Fog: an Object Lesson, is scheduled to be published by Bloomsbury in 2019.
Media
Watch the 2018 National Book Awards Ceremony
Author of The Friend Sigrid Nunez accepts the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction
Author of The New Negro Jeffrey C. Stewart accepts the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Author of Indecency Justin Phillip Reed accepts the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry
Monique Truong (on behalf of Yoko Tawada) and Margaret Mitsutani accept the 2018 National Book Award for Translated Literature
Author of The Poet X, Elizabeth Acevedo accepts the 2018 National Book Award for Young People's Literature
The Finalists Announced for the 2018 National Book Awards
