PEN Center USA - 22nd Annual Literary Awards Festival

Literary Award winners announced. The organization is also set to honor Morgan Entrekin, Joyce Carol Oates, and Lara Logan.

Beverly Hills, CA: PEN Center USA is proud to announce the winners of the 2012 Literary Awards, who will be honored at the 22nd Annual Literary Awards Festival on October 22, 2012, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The festival will feature the presentation of the Literary Awards, which include one thousand dollar cash prizes and honor the best writing in the western states, in eleven genres. A distinguished panel of writers, editors, critics, and journalists judge the Literary Awards. This news follows the announcement of three of the year’s festival honorees: Morgan Entrekin will receive the Award of Honor, Joyce Carol Oates will receive the Lifetime Achievement Award, and CBS correspondent Lara Logan will receive the Freedom to Write Award. The recipient of the First Amendment Award will be announced in the coming months.

PEN Center USA 2012 Literary Award winners include Siobhan Fallon, Fiction: You Know When the Men Are Gone (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam); Anne Waldman, Poetry: The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (Coffee House Press); Candice Millard, Research Nonfiction: Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and Murder of a President (Anchor); Eavan Boland, Creative Nonfiction: A Journey with Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet (W.W. Norton & Co.); Suzanne Jill Levine, Translation: The Lizard's Tale: A Novel, originally by Jose Donoso (Northwestern University Press); Matthew J. Kirby, Children's Literature: Icefall (Scholastic Press); Joe Sacco, Graphic Literature: Body of Work; Ben Ehrenreich, Journalism: Drip, Jordan: Israel's water war with Palestine (Harper’s Magazine); Michelle Carter, Drama: How to Pray; Annie Mumolo & Kristen Wiig, Screenplay: Bridesmaids; Alex Ganza, Howard Gordon, and Gideon Raff, Teleplay: Homeland: “Pilot” (Showtime).

Morgan Entrekin, Award of Honor Honoree, is president and publisher of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. After graduating from Stanford and the Radcliffe Publishing Course, he joined Delacorte Press in 1977, where he worked with such authors as Kurt Vonnegut, Jayne Anne Phillips, Nick Tosches, and Richard Brautigan. In 1982, he moved to Simon & Schuster, where he acquired books by Richard Ford, Bret Easton Ellis, and Dr. Michael Debakey. In 1984, he left to start his own imprint at Atlantic Monthly Press. More than 40 titles were published under the Morgan Entrekin Books/Atlantic Monthly Press imprint, including books by P.J. O’Rourke, Rian Malan, Richard Preston, Ron Chernow, and Francisco Goldman. In 1991, Morgan acquired, with a group of investors, Atlantic Monthly Press. In 1993, he merged the company with Grove Press, publisher of Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, and Harold Pinter, among others. Grove/Atlantic publishes general nonfiction, current affairs, history, biography, narrative journalism, fiction, drama, and poetry.;

Joyce Carol Oates, Lifetime Achievement Honoree, is a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize), and the New York Times bestsellers The Falls (winner of the 2005 Prix Femina Etranger) and The Gravedigger’s Daughter. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature and The Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lara Logan, Freedom to Write Honoree, has earned a prominent spot among the world's best foreign correspondents with her bold, award-winning reporting from war zones over the past nineteen years. In February 2011, she was sexually assaulted and beaten by a mob while reporting on the Egyptian revolution in Tahrir Square. She broke her silence about the incident on 60 Minutes to draw attention to the plight of women—particularly female journalists covering war zones—across the world. The 2011-12 season will be her seventh reporting for 60 Minutes. Logan's daily reports have been an integral part of CBS News' coverage of the war in Iraq, both before and after U.S. troops moved into the country. She was the only journalist from an American network in Baghdad when the U.S. military invaded the city, reporting live from Firdos Square as the statue of Saddam fell. Since then, she has spent the majority of her time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Logan has received an Emmy Award, Overseas Press Club Award, a DuPont-Columbia University silver baton, a Murrow Award, five American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Awards, a David Bloom Award, and the 2007 Association of International Broadcasters' Best International News Story Award for her report on the Taliban.