NEC Faculty Win Literary Prizes

June 30, 2022

NEC News

Congratulations to two faculty members in NEC’s MFA in Creative Writing program for their recent literary prizes.

Anais Duplan

Anais has received a 2022 Whiting Foundation Award in Nonfiction for his essay collection BLACKSPACE: On the Poetics of an Afrofuture.

Learn more about BLACKSPACE.

Learn about the Whiting Awards.

Anaïs is a trans* poet, curator, and artist. In addition to BLACKSPACE (Black Ocean, 2020), he is the author of full-length poetry collection Take This Stallion (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) and chapbook, Mount Carmel and the Blood of Parnassus (Monster House Press, 2017). He has taught poetry at the University of Iowa, Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, and St. Joseph’s College.

His video works have been exhibited by Flux Factory, Daata Editions, the 13th Baltic Triennial in Lithuania, Mathew Gallery, NeueHouse, the Paseo Project, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2021. As an independent curator, he has facilitated curatorial projects in Chicago; Boston; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Reykjavík, Iceland. He was a 2017–2019 joint Public Programs fellow at the Museum of Modern Art and the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 2016, he founded the Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program for artists of color, based at Iowa City’s artist-run organization Public Space One. He works as Program Manager at Recess.

David Ryan

MFA in Creative Writing Faculty

David has been named a 2022 O. Henry Prize winner for his short story “Warp and Weft” in Harvard Review.

Read “Warp and Weft.”

Learn about the O. Henry Prize.

David is the author of the short story collection, Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked (Ig Publishing). His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Tin House, BOMB, Fence, Denver Quarterly, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others, and has been anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton), Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic Books), and The Mississippi Review: 30 Years. His essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, Tin House, BOMB, BookForum, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Fiction (Oxford University Press), and others. A founding editor of the literary magazine, Post Road, he currently edits the Fiction and Theatre sections.