2013 Whiting Writers' Award Winners Announced

Infinite congratulations to the winners of the 2013 Whiting Writers' Awards, including (poets) Ishion Hutchinson and Rowan Ricardo Phillips. This just in from Jacket Copy:

To be an emerging writer who gets some kind of formal acknowledgment is one thing; for that nod to come with a check for $50,000 is something else entirely.

The 2013 Whiting Writers' Awards -- which do, yes, come with $50,000 prizes -- were announced at a gala ceremony Monday night in Manhattan. As usual, the authors are not household names -- yet.

The goal of the Whiting Awards is to support writers early in their careers so they can focus on their work. Having now been awarded for 29 years, previous Whiting Writers' Award winners have gone on to do great things. They include novelist Jonathan Franzen, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Colson Whitehead, National Book Award-winning poets Terrance Hayes and Mark Doty, National Book Award finalists C.D. Wright and Ben Fountain and many more.

The 10 authors who have been awarded the 2013 prizes write in many genres; two write both fiction and nonfiction; four write fiction; two are poets; and there is one nonfiction writer and one playwright.

Here's the scoop on this year's poets:

Ishion Hutchinson, poetry. His first collection, "Far District: Poems," was published by Peepal Tree Press Limited in 2010. Born in Jamaica, and a recipient of the 2011 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, he is an assistant professor of English at Cornell and lives in Ithaca, N.Y.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips, poetry. His first collection, "The Ground," was published by Farrar Straus & Giroux in 2012. He is an associate professor of English at Stony Brook, director of the Poetry Center as well as a contributing writer for Artforum. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

Read more about the winners at Jacket Copy.