{"id":2443125,"date":"2019-04-18T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=304039"},"modified":"2019-04-18T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T06:00:00","slug":"aspen-words-literary-prize-nominees-on-fiction-and-social-impact","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/aspen-words-literary-prize-nominees-on-fiction-and-social-impact\/","title":{"rendered":"Aspen Words Literary Prize nominees on fiction and social impact"},"content":{"rendered":"
Finalists for the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize at the Morgan Library in New York on April 11. From left to right, moderator Renee Montagne of NPR, Tommy Orange, Tayari Jones, Jennifer Clement, David Chariandy and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.<\/strong>
Joe Carrotta\/Courtesy photo<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As novelist Tayari Jones accepted the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize on April 11<\/a>, the \u201cAn American Marriage\u201d author praised the award\u2019s mission of honoring fiction that illuminates political and social issues.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re told not to,\u201d she told the audience at the Morgan Library in New York and live-streaming at the library in Aspen. \u201cWe\u2019re told that\u2019s not what real art does. An award like this, I think it encourages all of us to keep following the strength of our convictions.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a panel discussion before Jones was named the winner, she and her four fellow nominees discussed how and why their work addresses the issues of the day.<\/p>\n

Tommy Orange, nominated for his novel \u201cThere There\u201d about \u201curban Indians\u201d in Oakland, California, said the art has to come before all else.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe in a Trojan Horse model for art,\u201d he said. \u201cTo let it in with beauty or whatever is compelling about the art, and then have the message contained.\u201d<\/p>\n

The surreal and often disturbing stories in Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah\u2019s debut collection \u201cFriday Black\u201d take today\u2019s America and push it to its extreme logical endpoint, cleverly and devastatingly making readers think deeper about issues of racism and what he described as \u201csinister consumerism.\u201d His subjects found him, he said, because the country is in crisis on many fronts and he could not write about anything else.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the house is on fire, I\u2019m not going to write about what\u2019s in the fridge,\u201d Adjei-Brenyah said to laughter from the audience. \u201cThe things that I write about are the things that I have to write about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jennifer Clement, in \u201cGun Love,\u201d paints a searing picture of American gun culture and poverty. She noted that we don\u2019t often think of contemporary novels as shaping history, but that when history is written it\u2019s often the fiction of an era that\u2019s credited for defining the times.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has actually created social change,\u201d she said. \u201cMany times when we look back, we don\u2019t remember any of the journalism of the time but we do remember the novels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her novel is undergirded by deep research into the American weapons industry \u2014 moderator Renee Montagne learned that there are two bullets on Earth for every human, for instance \u2014 but Clement said her subjects must come from an emotional connection.<\/p>\n

\u201cMostly I write about the things that won\u2019t let go of me \u2014 there are things in the world that hurt on a certain level,\u201d Clement said.<\/p>\n

But \u201cBrother\u201d author David Chariandy, whose nominated book centers on the immigrant population in the Scarborough neighborhood of Toronto, said he can\u2019t see a distinction between political art and non-political.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s impossible to be attentive to language, to tell a story, to craft a story that comes from a specific perspective and represents a specific consciousness without being political and without being socially aware,\u201d he said. \u201cOr you are not being a good writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Tayari Jones, who will speak in Aspen at the Summer Words literary festival June 18, coming out of an activist family tradition was going to shape her perspective no matter what she did.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were reared with an idea that you could be whatever you wanted to be, as long as whatever you did with your life you did it in the service of justice,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

So she never considered writing about anything other than topics like the broken criminal justice system, which is the engine of her winning novel about a young African-American couple split apart by a wrongful conviction and incarceration.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never considered whether or not I would engage political issues,\u201d she said. \u201cI understood that to be my life\u2019s work. But when I was a young writer I would be thinking about how to make sure that my political views and my social critique made it into the writing. I came to realize later that that\u2019s my worldview \u2014 that anything I write is going to be infused with that worldview. I was able to relax a little bit. And, instead of make a point, to tell the truth, because the point is in the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

atravers@aspentimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Finalists for the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize at the Morgan Library in New York on April 11. From left to right, moderator Renee Montagne of NPR, Tommy Orange, Tayari Jones, Jennifer Clement, David Chariandy and Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.Joe Carrotta\/Courtesy photo As novelist Tayari Jones accepted the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize on April 11, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2443125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-16 21:25:49","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2443125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2443125\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2443125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2443125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2443125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}