Events › The 34th Annual PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Awards

Called by The New York Times “The Blue Collar PEN,” PEN Oakland invites you to join us for the 34th Annual PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Awards.

The PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Awards, named for the late poet and Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, were created to provide recognition for outstanding literary achievement from the entire spectrum of America’s diverse literary community. In addition there is an Adelle Foley Award, a Reginald Martin Award for Excellence in Criticism, and a Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award.

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The 2023 PEN Oakland Award Recipients are:

Josephine Miles Award

• Javier Zamora, Solito: A Memoir (Hogarth)
• Ada Limón, The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions)
• Perennial Earth: Poetry by Wallace Stevens and Paintings by Alexis Serio, edited by John N. Serio (New Perennials Publishing)
• T. J. English, Dangerous Rhythms: Jazz and the Underworld (William Morrow)
• Leila Mottley, Nightcrawling: A Novel (Knopf)
• Jenny Xie, The Rupture Tense (Graywolf)
• Kobena Mercer, Alain Locke & The Visual Arts (Yale University Press)
• D.S. Marriott, Before Whiteness (City Lights Publishers)
• Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime Hernandez, and Mario Hernandez, Love and Rockets: The First Fifty: The Classic 40th Anniversary Collection (Fantagraphics)

Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award

• Louise Meriwether and the late Sarah Webster Fabio for her Folkways jazz poetry albums, now Smithsonian/Folkways (Boss Soul; Soul Ain’t Soul Is; Together to the Tune of Coltrane’s Equinox; JuJus Alchemy of the Blues)

Adelle Foley Award

• The Daily KOS and the late Joyce Wong

Reginald Martin Award for Excellence in Criticism

• Tressie McMillan Cottom