Thursday, October 10th
7:00-8:30 pm
Grand Tier III, Center for the Arts,
4373 Mason Pond Drive, Fairfax, VA
The Second Annual Institute for Immigration Research New American Voices Award will be presented on October 10th, 2019. The New American Voices Award was created to celebrate the expression of complex human experiences as told by immigrant authors in recently published books. Immigrant work has been historically underrepresented in writing and publishing.
This year's finalists are novelists Melissa Rivero, author of The Affairs of the Falcón, Eugenia Kim, author of The Kinship of Secrets, and Angie Kim, author of Miracle Creek. Each finalist will read excerpts from their novel at the award ceremony. The winning writer will receive $5,000 and the two finalists will each receive $1,000.
Melissa Rivero was born in Lima, Peru and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her debut novel is The Affairs of the Falcón, which is recognized by Fall for the Book. Undocumented for most of her childhood, Rivero became a U.S. citizen in her early twenties. Her writing has taken her to the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony, and the VONA/Voices Workshop.
Eugenia Kim's second novel The Kinship of Secrets received a starred review from Booklist, and was an Amazon Best Book of the Month, Literature and Fiction. Her debut novel, The Calligrapher’s Daughter, won the 2009 Borders Original Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and was a critics’ pick by the Washington Post.
Angie Kim moved as a preteen from Seoul, South Korea, to the suburbs of Baltimore. She is the debut author of the national bestseller Miracle Creek, a literary courtroom drama that has been named a LibraryReads Selection, an IndieNext pick, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, a Book of the Month Club selection, and Apple Books’ Top Ten Debuts of 2019.
This year's judges are best selling author, Reyna Grande, journalist and former civil rights lawyer, Alia Malek, and author of This House is Not for Sale, E.C. Osondu.
Fall for the Book is an independent non-profit literary arts organization held at George Mason University that promotes reading by sponsoring a variety of year-round events and activities.
September 27, 2019