Olufunke Grace Bankole, Cristina Jiménez, and Shubha Sunder Named Finalists for 8th Annual New American Voices Award
Olufunke Grace Bankole’s The Edge of Water, Cristina Jiménez’s Dreaming of Home: How We Turn Fear into Pride, Power, and Real Change, and Shubha Sunder’s Optional Practical Training: A Novel have have been named finalists for the Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award. Celebrating its 8th 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 Marie Myung-Ok Lee, Brando Skyhorse, and Mary-Alice Daniel.
The winner will be announced this fall, and all three finalists will join the judges for an award ceremony and reading to discuss their work. The event will be hosted by Fall for the Book on Thursday, October 9 at 7:30 p.m. at George Mason University’s Fairfax, VA Campus.
Praise from the Judges
Judge's Citations
“Unfolding artfully through the character, culture, and conflicts of an aptly named protagonist, Amina—meaning “truth”—The Edge of Water by Olufunke Grace Bankole is a stunning, statement-making debut novel. If the conventional “hero’s journey” involves going out, and the journey of heroines involves returning home, the narrative of the nomad—the immigrant narrative—encompasses both at once. The fragments of this lovely story’s “shells” reveal a transcontinental landscape: African, American, arabesque. Spiraling within stands a dreamscape wherein multigenerational bonds crystallize in elegant tendrils and in tender language that is in turns tender, lovely, and ambitious—ultimately successful—in its conveyance of the communal and individual: internal and externalized alienation, assimilation, adaptation, and arrival.”-Mary-Alice Daniel
“Dreaming of Home is an unforgettable journey, and a milestone in memoir: gripping, educational, and brimming with ideas at how to build lasting community. Its author, Cristina Jiménez, is a writer of thunderous skill and grace whose remarkable book reminds us, time and again, how important the values of compassion and generosity truly are. Cristina’s story is as inspirational as it is prescient for anyone whose voice is striving to be heard in a calamitous time. What’s in these pages demonstrate what values define a true American voice: empathy, imagination, fearlessness. Read this book and fill yourself with hope.” -Brando Skyhorse
“In Optional Practical Training, Shubha Sunder introduces us to Pavitra, a U.S. college graduate from Bangalore who decides to extend her stay in America via the OPT one-year visa. The year is 2006 and Sunder brilliantly limns the different ways Pavitra knowingly or unknowingly performs her identity as an immigrant after landing a job teaching math and physics at a private school in Massachusetts, often to make others (white people) feel comfortable, while at the mercy of a capricious and draconian post 9-11 immigration system that stands as an essential historical reminder of the precursor to the chaos and violence we have today.” -Marie Myung-Ok Lee
About the Finalists
Olufunke Grace Bankole is a Nigerian American writer, and author of the debut novel The Edge of Water (Tin House). A graduate of Harvard Law School, and a recipient of a Soros Justice Advocacy Fellowship, her work has appeared in various literary journals, including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train Stories, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Letters, The Antioch Review, and Stand Magazine. She won the first-place prize in the Glimmer Train Short-Story Award for New Writers, and was the Bread Loaf-Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She has been awarded an Oregon Literary Fellowship in Fiction, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, a residency-fellowship from the Anderson Center at Tower View, and has received a Pushcart Special Mention for her writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon.
Cristina Jiménez is an award-winning community organizer and a leading voice in movements for social justice. She is Co-Founder and former Executive Director of United We Dream, the largest immigrant youth-led organization in the country. A Distinguished Lecturer at the City University of New York, Jimenez received a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship and a spot on the 2018 TIME 100 Most Influential People List. She came to the U.S from Ecuador in 1998 and grew up undocumented in Queens, N.Y.
Shubha Sunder is the author of Boomtown Girl, a story collection set in her hometown of Bangalore, India, that won the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts, with her family.
The Judges
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