National Book Award Finalists
USC Dornsife students, faculty and staff members and alumni have another reason to take pride: two of their fellow Trojans were named among the finalists for the National Book Awards.
Doctoral candidate Robin Coste Lewis’ debut book, Voyage of the Sable Venus (Alfred Knopf, 2015), appears among the list of five finalists in the poetry category. The collection of verses recently received a glowing review from The New Yorker.
Alumna Angela Flournoy’s first novel, The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), is among the five hopefuls in the fiction category. It was named a Summer 2015 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a May 2015 Indie Next pick and a New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor’s Choice.
Alumna Angela Flournoy and her book. Photo by LaToya Duncan.
Lewis, a Provost’s Fellow in the Ph.D. in Creative Writing & Literature program and a teaching assistant in the Thematic Options program, is a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her MFA in poetry from New York University (NYU) and an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University.
A finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, Lewis has published her work in various journals and anthologies including The Massachusetts Review, Callaloo, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, Transition: Women in Literary Arts, VIDA, Phantom Limb, and Lambda Literary Review. She has taught at Wheaton College, Hunter College, Hampshire College, and the NYU Low-Residency MFA in Paris.
Robin Coste Lewis and her book. Photo by Kate Flint.
Flournoy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and earned her bachelor’s in English with an emphasis in creative writing at USC Dornsife in 2007. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University.
Flournoy’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Republic and The Los Angeles Review of Books.
The National Book Award is one of the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes. Finalists were announced Oct. 14. Winners will be announced at the 66th National Book Awards on Nov. 18.