2020 PEN/Faulkner Award Longlist Includes Two Poets

The 2020 PEN/Faulkner Award Longlist is here (winners receive "receive a cool $15,000," says LitHub), and two poets have made the cut: Ben Lerner and Ocean Vuong, for The Topeka School and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, respectively. This year's judges, Patricia Engle, Ru Freeman, and Porochista Khakpour, were asked to select their 10 most significant books published in 2019. The full list:

Sea Monsters, Chloe Aridjis (Catapult)

Patsy, Nicole Dennis-Benn (Liveright)

Sing to It: New Stories, Amy Hempel (Scribner)

The Topeka School, Ben Lerner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li (Random House)

The Night Swimmers, Peter Rock (Soho Press)

We Cast a Shadow, Maurice Carlos Ruffin (One World)

A People’s History of Heaven, Mathangi Subramanian (Algonquin Books)

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)

The Bird King, G. Willow Wilson (Grove Press)

The shortlist will round them down to five, and the winner is announced in April. Congrats to all! More info at the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.