Alex Espinoza, Carrie Sun, and Shahnaz Habib Named Finalists for 7th Annual New American Voices Award
Alex Espinoza’s novel The Sons of El Rey, Carrie Sun’s memoir Private Equity, and Shahnaz Habib’s book Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel, have been named finalists for the Institute for Immigration Research’s New American Voices Award. Celebrating its 7th anniversary, this post-publication award recognizes recently published works that illuminate the complexity of human experience as told by immigrants, whose work is historically underrepresented in writing and publishing. This year’s book prize was judged by Myriam J.A. Chancy, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Karin Tanabe.
The winner will be announced this fall, and all three finalists will join the judges for an award ceremony and reading on Thursday, October 17 in Grand Tier III in the Center for the Arts at George Mason University to discuss their work.
Praise from the Judges
“The Sons of El Rey is a triumph. Deeply original, yet rooted in the dreams and struggles of the immigrant experience, it chronicles three generations of Vega family men as they move through Mexico City and Los Angeles, while grappling with queer identity and family expectations, and bravely defining their own masculinity. Bringing to life the lucha libre wrestling tradition, Alex Espinoza carries the same energy to his narrators, and through them, has created a complex and compassionate story of the masks we choose to put on and who we want to remove them with for good. An absolute shooting star of a book.”
“With disarming humor, Shanaz Habib in Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel challenges the presupposition that people from the Global South ‘don’t travel, they immigrate.’ Through essays, both personal and well-researched, she tackles a wide range of travel-related topics from the history of passports to forests, carousels, and pickles. The realities she uncovers in the process are often as startling as they are eye-opening and reshape our sense of what it means to travel as a person from the Third World across disparate geographies, from the streets of Brooklyn to those of Istanbul. A captivating, beautifully written work that will spark many conversations.”
“In Private Equity, Carrie Sun questions how we make and remake ourselves both through our careers and beyond them. Work is a classic American story, and also one that has long been associated with immigrants and their children striving to climb society’s ladders. In Sun’s hands, this quintessential coming-of-age story is new again, as her clear, direct telling not only brings us into the mesmerizing world of a hedge fund, but also invites us to question how capitalism works, who pays the most, and why. Sun writes movingly about the kinds of ambition others allow us and what we allow ourselves; what it means to work for another person, and what it means to work for oneself. What lies on the other side of working as hard as you can? With this stunning, fearless, original memoir, Carrie Sun delivers a must-read answer.”
About the Judges
Myriam J. A. Chancy is the author of the novel Village Weavers, a Time best book of April. Her previous novel, What Storm, What Thunder, was named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, Library Journal, the Boston Globe, and The Globe and Mail. Her past novels include The Loneliness of Angels, winner of the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award in Fiction and Spirit of Haiti. She is also the author of several nonfiction works, including most recently, Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and HBA Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California.
V. V. Ganeshananthan (she/her) is the author of the novels Brotherless Night, longlisted for the Women’s Prize and the Asian Prize, shortlisted for the Carol Shields Prize, and a finalist for a Minnesota Book Award, and Love Marriage, longlisted for the Women’s Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. She has been visiting faculty at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and now teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota.
Karin Tanabe is the author of seven novels, including her most recent, The Sunset Crowd. A former Politico reporter, her writing has also appeared in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Chicago Tribune, and Newsday. She is a frequent book reviewer for The Washington Post and has appeared as a celebrity and politics expert on Entertainment Tonight, CNN, and the CBS Early Show. Karin is a graduate of Vassar College and lives in Washington DC.
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