Announcing the PEN Longlists, Pt. 3

PEN Open Book Award ($5,000):

For an exceptional book-length work of literature by an author of color published in 2015.

JUDGES: Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Celeste Ng, and Héctor Tobar

LONGLIST:
Chord (Sarabande Books), Rick Barot
Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books), Reginald Dwayne Betts
Forest Primeval: Poems (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern), Vievee Francis
It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern), Angela Jackson
God Loves Haiti: A Novel (Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers), Dimitry Elias Léger
Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey (W. W. Norton & Company), Marie Mutsuki Mockett
The Pink Box (Aquarius Press/Willow Books), Yesenia Montilla
The Blind Writer: Stories and a Novella (University Of Hawai’i Press), Sameer Pandya
Heaven: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint), Lauret Savoy

PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography ($5,000):

For a distinguished biography published in 2015.

weld award

JUDGES: Nell Irvin Painter, Deborah Solomon, and Simon Winchester

LONGLIST:
In Search of Sir Thomas Browne: The Life and Afterlife of the Seventeenth Century’s Most Inquiring Mind (W. W. Norton & Company), Hugh Aldersey-Williams
Joan of Arc: A History (Harper Books), Helen Castor
Sinatra: The Chairman (Doubleday), James Kaplan
The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (W. W. Norton & Company), Deborah Lutz
Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers), James McGrath Morris
Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames & Hudson), Nancy Princenthal
Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age (Columbia University Press), Stuart Schaar
John le Carré: The Biography (Harper Books), Adam Sisman
Michelle Obama: A Life (Alfred A. Knopf), Peter Slevin
Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (Harper Books), Rosemary Sullivan