This year's Whiting Literary Magazine Prizes have been announced. The award, established in 2018, comes with a monetary prize of up to $60,000 given out over three years, as well as professional networking and development support.
This year's winners were selected from a pool of around 70 applicants and include three magazines from New York, plus one each from Los Angeles, St. Paul, Minn., Great Barrington, Mass. and Conway, Ark. In a statement, the judges praised the winners "for their remarkable rigor, gorgeous curation of literature, international perspective, and for being, as literary magazines so often are, essential incubators for our most creative and innovative thinkers and writers."
The judges said that the magazines they chose highlight a diversity of writers, plus "writers around the world thinking about the environment in critical new ways."
"We are thrilled to receive the Whiting Award," said Lana Barkawi, the executive and artistic editor of Mizna, a magazine which primarily publishes Arab, Southwest Asian and North African writers. "We work outside of the mainstream literary landscape that often undervalues and marginalizes our community's art. This award gives our writers the visibility they deserve and is an exciting step for Mizna toward sustainability. We want to be around for the next 25 years and all the daring, beautiful work that's to come."
The prize is restricted to magazines based in the United States and aimed toward adult readers. It's awarded every three years to up to eight publications.
Here's a list of this year's winners and how they describe themselves:
Guernica (Brooklyn, NY): "A digital magazine with a global outlook, exploring connections between ideas, society and individual lives."
Los Angeles Review of Books (Los Angeles): "Launched in 2011 in part as a response to the disappearance of the newspaper book review supplement, and with it, the art of lively, intelligent, long-form writing on recent publications in every genre."
Mizna (St. Paul, Minn.): A magazine that "reflects the literatures of Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) communities and fosters the exchange and examination of ideas, allowing readers and audiences to engage with SWANA writers and artists on their own terms."
n+1 (Brooklyn, NY): A magazine that "encourages writers, new and established, to take themselves as seriously as possible, to write with as much energy and daring as possible, and to connect their own deepest concerns with the broader social and political environment—that is, to write, while it happens, a history of the present day."
Orion (Great Barrington, Mass.): "Through writing and art that explore the connection between nature and culture, it inspires new thinking about how humanity might live on Earth justly, sustainably, and joyously."
Oxford American (Conway, Ark.): "Oxford American celebrates the South's immense cultural impact on the nation–its foodways, literary innovation, fashion history, visual art, and music–and recognizes that as much as the South can be found in the world, one can find the world in the South."
The Paris Review (New York): A magazine that "showcases a lively mix of exceptional poetry, fiction, and nonfiction and delights in celebrating writers at all career stages."
Edited by Jennifer Vanasco, produced by Beth Novey.
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