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National Book Foundation > Author > Jonathan Escoffery
Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. More about this author >
In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. More about this book >
Jonathan Escoffery is the recipient of the 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction, a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and the 2020 ASME Award for Fiction. His fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Passages North, ZYZZYVA, and Electric Literature, and has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing. He received his MFA from the University of Minnesota, is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California and a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. If I Survive You is his debut book.
(Photo credit: Cola Casados)