Intersection for the Arts: Readings by 2009 Jackson Phelan Tanenbaum Literary Award Winners Youmna Chlala, Edan Lepucki & Page McBee

Winners from this year's highly competitive 52nd Annual Jackson Award, 72nd Annual Phelan Award, and 19th Annual Tanenbaum Award read from their award-winning works.They will also be joined by this year's Judges of the Award competition - Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, and giovanni singleton. Sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation, these awards have been administered by Intersection since 1991.

This year's award winners are:

Joseph Henry Jackson Award
Youmna Chlala of San Francisco, CA for her poetry manuscript “The Paper Camera”

James Duval Phelan Award
Edan Lepucki of Los Angeles, CA for her fiction manuscript “Days of Insignificance and Evil”

Mary Tanenbaum Award
Page McBee of Oakland, CA for her nonfiction manuscript “This Fragile Fortress”

The distinguished Joseph Henry Jackson and James Duval Phelan Literary Awards, sponsored by The San Francisco Foundation and administered by Intersection for the Arts since 1991, are offered annually to encourage young writers (20 to 35 years old), who are either California-born or currently residing in Northern California or Nevada for an unpublished manuscript-in-progress. 2009 marks the 52nd annual Jackson Award and the 72nd annual Phelan Award. In addition to a $2,000 cash award for each of the three awards, award-winning manuscripts will be permanently housed at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. Each of the 2009 award winners will read from their award-winning manuscripts. These awards have proven to be instrumental in the career of young writers, many of whom have gone on to securing either literary agents or publishing contracts as a result of these awards.

Winners of the 2009 Joseph Henry Jackson, James Duval Phelan & Mary Tanenbaum Literary Awards:

2009 Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award

Youmna Chlala of San Francisco, CA for her poetry manuscript “The Paper Camera.”

Youmna Chlala (San Francisco, CA) is a writer and visual artist. She received her MFA at the California College of the Arts where she was also the Founding Editor of Eleven Eleven {1111} Journal of Literature and Art. Nominated for Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, she has published in theMIT Journal for Middle Eastern Studies, XCP: Journal of Cross Cultural Poetics. She is the recipient of residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook and Can Serrat, among others. She also received a Walker Fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has read her fiction for Neighborhood Public Radio’s project in the 2008 Whitney Biannual and is working on a novel about architecture in Beiurt and Los Angeles. She is currently visiting faculty at LaGuardia Community College and Pratt Institute in New York.

The official award citation for Youmna Chlala's 2009 Joseph Henry Jackson Award winning poetry manuscript “The Paper Camera” states:In The Paper Camera “wings crocheted from orange blossoms” and “windows stained pink with rosewater” serve as richly storied lenses. Whether digital or disposable, Youmna Chlala gives us an expansive view of struggle, of emotion, and of all that is as fragile and as impermanent as paper. These poems are unnerving in that they seem unaware of their identity as poems. The words, their images, come in close, befriend you but not without a shadow presence, not without the negative from which they have been developed. Often the poems’ ambiguous endings arrive unmarked, unpunctuated. And beyond this appears to be an unescorted haunting wrapped in paper silence. Geography and history become stones thrown into water, rippling outward into the ordinariness, the simple grace of the everyday. And for this we “walk across olive groves to get to the almond, to crack it in our teeth suck its juice.” Many tongues, crumpled or neatly folded, seek to articulate the inherent complications of nature, of wholeness, of belonging, and even of breakfast. We are reminded that war in the world makes language and its translations a battleground. Ultimately,The Paper Camera brilliantly exposes the unraveling of existence and offers a glimpse of our own necessary rise from ash. - 2009 Panel of Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich & giovanni singleton

2009 James Duval Phelan Literary Award

Edan Lepucki of Los Angeles, CA for her fiction manuscript “Days of Insignificance and Evil.”

Edan Lepucki (Los Angeles, CA) was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, and her fiction has been published in Narrative Magazine, Meridian, and theLos Angeles Times Magazine, among others. She is a regular contributor to the popular books and culture website The Millions, and she has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Ucross Foundation, and the Squaw Valley Writers' Conference. She has recently finished a novel.

The official award citation for Edan Lepucki's 2009 James Duval Phelan Award winning fiction manuscript “Days of Insignificance and Evil” states: “But wait. I want to tell you another story, one that happened a few years before this. It must be related.” So says Rosalyn, the fourteen year old narrator in Edan Lepucki’s Days of Insignificance and Evil. In this remarkable and revelatory new novel we find Rosalyn carried along by events beyond her control—parents who abandon her to an older sister’s care, a new home life full of fracture, secret liaisons, and mysterious clues to a violent historical event; the all-female 1904 Los Angeles Iron Foundry Rebellion. As readers we’re carried along by a narrative voice in total control. Lepucki gives us a character that comes across as true and familiar as someone we know very well. Someone willing to share their secrets with us. Like the narrator we are quickly on the hunt to find out more about that past event. Members of the rebellion surprise us by interrupting Rosalyn’s narrative and bringing their flesh and blood voices to the mix. Via that weave of past and present Lepucki makes disparate worlds and time periods cohere in ways the reader never anticipates. Here’s a writer who has the extraordinary ability to make both worlds—and all worlds—true simultaneously. And as we turn each page we know there’s always another story waiting, another twist and turn, a dog leg into the past, a time bomb in the present. Go ahead, we want to say. Tell us another one. Serendipity or coincidence, chance or fate. It must all be related. - 2009 Panel of Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, & giovanni singleton

2009 Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award for Nonfiction:

Page McBee of Oakland, CA for her nonfiction manuscript “This Fragile Fortress.”

Page McBee (Oakland, CA) is in her fourth year as a writer-in-residence at the San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA). She has co-curated and co-organized the multidisciplinary San Francisco arts event series "Go" as well as the Pittsburgh arm of the reading series, "K'vetsh." Page has been published most recently in Big Bell and the anthology, Baby, Remember My Name, and is currently a guest blogger exploring representations of the body for Bitch magazine. Page was selected to attend RADAR Production's writers' retreat, Radar LAB, in 2009. Page has worked in education at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Academic Talent Development Program at UC-Berkeley, and at the Academy of Arts and Sciences in San Francisco. In 2008, Page served as the Literary Arts Curator for SFUSD's district-wide Young at Art event. Page's writing can be found in multiple print and online publications, as well as on her website, www.pagemcbee.com. Page holds an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State, and a BFA in creative writing from Emerson College.

The official award citation for Page McBee's 2009 Mary Tanenbaum winning nonfiction manuscript, “This Fragile Fortress” states: When a piece of writing troubles us, stirs us, ignites our curiosity, and leaves us wanting more, we know deep-down that this writer has something to say. Such is the case with Page McBee's "This Fragile Fortress," an ambitious hybrid collection of interpersonal essays that explore the body and the meaning of embodiment. McBee's challenge is to find a language that gets at both the comfort of bodies and the estrangement that they also evoke. Her essays, informed by scientific philosophy, mythology and the concept of liminality, are undergirded by a deeply personal exploration into her own journey through a transgressively gendered experience. Her work in this collection is to erect an archive that is woven from her own stories and the stories we tell ourselves as humans. Just as readily, however, McBee aims to undermine that same archive with a recognition of how truly fragile we are--even when we build a fortress of stories around ourselves. Her work is rich with possibilities and inventive in its attempts to move beyond merely an exotic narrative of "self" but instead in grappling with bigger ideas which she identifies as "trauma, healing, expression, memory, and history." - 2008 Panel of Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, & giovanni singleton

Panel of 2009 Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, giovanni singleton

CELEBRATION & READING
2009 Literary Award winners will read from their award-winning works at Intersection on Monday November 16, 2009 at 7:30pm.

Readings by 2009 Jackson Phelan Tanenbaum Literary Award Winners Youmna Chlala, Edan Lepucki & Page McBee

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