Deborah Eisenberg (1987) was the 2011 winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. She won the prize—which honors the “best published works of fiction by American citizens“—for The Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg.
Gretel Ehrlich (1987): PEN New England awarded its 2010 Henry David Thoreau Prize to Gretel Ehrlich “in recognition of her exceptional talents as a nature writer who so artfully expresses the grandeur and loneliness of natural settings.”
Jeffrey Eugenides’s (1993) new novel, The Marriage Plot, was published in October 2011 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Jonathan Franzen (1988) published a collection of essays with FSG in April 2012 entitled Farther Away.
Paul Guest (2007) was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for poetry in 2011.
Forrest Gander (1997) was awarded the Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship in 2011.
Stephen Adly Guirgis’s (2006) play, The Motherfucker with the Hat, was nominated for 6 Tony Awards in 2011.
Terrance Hayes (1999) won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry.
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2010_p_hayes.html
Jay Hopler (2009) was the recipient of a 2010-2011 Rome Fellowship in Literature (The Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, a Gift from the Drue Heinz Trust) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome.
Adam Johnson (2009) has a new book forthcoming from Random House in Jan 2012 called The Orphan Master’s Son.
http://www.randomhouse.com/book/212862/the-orphan-masters-son-by-adam-johnson
Rajiv Joseph’s (2009) play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was nominated for 3 Tony Awards in 2011.
Yiyun Li (2006) was named a 2010 MacArthur Fellow.
http://www.macfound.org/site/c.lkLXJ8MQKrH/b.6241255/k.D965/Yiyun_Li.htm
Rosemary Mahoney (1994) was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011.
Brighde Mullins (2001) was awarded a 2010 United States Artists Fellowship in Literature.
http://uscnews.usc.edu/arts/brighde_mullins_awarded_literature_fellowship.html
Benjamin Percy (2008) has sold his new novel, Red Moon, to Grand Central/Hachette to be published in 2012. His novel, The Wilding, won the 2011 Society of Midlands Authors Award for Fiction.
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Fun is still an important part of writing. I want to bring pleasure with everything I write. Intellectual pleasure, emotional pleasure, linguistic pleasure, aesthetic pleasure. I have in my mind 500 examples of novels that have given me pleasure, and I try to do work that gives back some of what those 500 books have given me.
Jonathan Franzen
Whiting Writers’ Award Winner, 1988