Dr. Adrienne Perry wins Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Adrienne Perry, who has received the inaugural Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Award from the journal Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalism. Dr. Perry received the award for a prose composition entitled Lamaze, which will be published in the journal.

In their citation for the award, the judges wrote: "Lamaze is the story of two mixed-race sisters, growing up in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and grappling with teenage pregnancy, racism, alcoholism, and domestic violence. Summarized like this, the story sounds bleak; it is anything but. The sure, powerful voice of the narrator, 15-year old Adrienne, is utterly compelling as she leads us backward in time, peeling back layers of her family's experience to discover the almost magical heart of her love for her older sister. The judges were captivated by the quality of this narrative voice, paired with the rigorous and sophisticated formality of the story's structure and the way it complicates in subtle and meaningful ways, issues of race, sexuality, class, and gender in rural America."

The judges added: "The Elizabeth Alexander Creative Writing Awards celebrates "an author whose work embodies the lyrically powerful and historically engaged nature of Dr. Alexander's writing. The award aims to highlight different forms of knowledge production that emerge from the artistic, political and cultural advocacy for transformative change undertaken by women of color nationally, transnationally, and globally. Our goal is to make knowledge production by and about women of color central to contemporary definitions of feminisms in the explorations of women's economic conditions, cultures, sexualities, as well as the forms and meanings of resistance and activist strategies."