Oakland, CA—July 11, 2002—Poetry that rocks, informs, and explores issues of racism and culture are a part of this year’s 12th Annual PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles National Literary Awards on Sunday, August 11th from 6:00 PM–8:00 PM at PRO ARTS in downtown Oakland (461 9th Street at Broadway). The evening will be hosted by author Jack Foley and honor Congresswoman Barbara Lee with the presentation of PEN Oakland’s 6th Annual Censorship Award. A reception and book signing will follow the awards. A $5–$8 donation is requested at the door. For more information, call (510) 525-3948.

The highlight of the evening will be the award-winning authors and special guests reading excerpts from their works. The winners include: Rise (Poems) by A. Van Jordan (Tia Chucha Press), Judge: Radames Ortiz The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (Poems) edited by Nathalie Handal (Interlink Books), Judge: Sam Hamod Approaching the Center (Poems) by Myronn Hardy (New Issues/Western Michigan University Press), Judge: Cornelius Eady Rooms Are Never Finished (Poems) by Agha Shahid Ali (W.W. Norton & Company), Judge: Wanda Coleman 4-F Blues: A Novel of WWII Hollywood (Novel) by Charles Rubin (New Century Publishers), Judge:Jonah Raskin

“A. Van Jordan is an energy, a nourishment, a Black Nation song...A. Van Jordan is an explorer, probing the valleys and chasms of human existence. His poems pulsate with a certain rawness that is sometimes bitterly angry but always eloquent, and the results are relentlessly powerful." These words by Radames Ortiz speak to the power of PEN Oakland Award-winner Jordan’s work.

Let my naked body be a mirror to the world.
Smell what lack of love does to the flesh.
—“Rise” by A. Van Jordan

The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, edited by Nathalie Handal, unites Arab women poets from all over the Arab world and abroad—whatever their language, and whether they were born in an Arab country or in the diaspora. Editor Nathalie Handal has put together an outstanding collection from North Africa, the Levant, and the Arabian Gulf, as well as Europe, the United States, and Canada. This anthology introduces poets who write in Arabic, French, English, and Swedish, among them some of the twentieth century's most accomplished poets and today's most exciting new voices.

"Myronn Hardy is a poet of the world, universal in the truest sense. He brings exquisite poetic diction and a gift for the image to the plazas of Havana, the villages of Madagascar, a tin schoolhouse in Soweto, an ancient wall in Rome scarred with racist graffiti. But this is not a collection of vacation poems; Hardy is sensitive to suffering and to defiance of suffering all around him. The poet awakens ghosts, invoking Hughes and Lorca, two voices that resonate throughout the poems. Just as the poet spreads a map across a picnic table in Arkansas, showing his grandparents the "ghost lands" of Africa they have forgotten, so he maps a world of poetry for the rest of us, drawing a line from Soweto to Little Rock. The poetry of Myronn Hardy is indelibly vivid; he makes a memorable debut." —Martin Espada

National Book Award nominee Agha Shahid Ali‘s work is described by Los Angeles Times critic Orol Muske-Dukes as follows: "What is timeless in these poems is the power of grief—sheer cliffs and drops of despair that Ali masters and spins into verse with astonishing technical virtuosity, employing his favorite form, the ancient ghazal…Besides Buddha and the Koran, there are echoes here of Judaic scripture. Ali is the voice of the whirlwind, the form once taken by the deity of the Old Testament. As the ghazal form weaves itself into the echoing tapestry of grief, readers follow the patterns, rapt, discerning chanting beyond the words. It is as if the high keening cry of elephants driven to their death by invaders of Kashmir—the sound that his dying mother likened to the sirens outside her hospital room at Lenox Hill in New York—rises in unbearable importuning."

National in scope, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Awards represent a new perception of multicultural literature that does not seek validation from the literary establishment, but creates its own standards and models of literature.

The PEN Oakland Literary Censorship Awards were inaugurated in 1997 to challenge censorship within the literary culture of the United States, including all aspects of the publishing process, as well as considerations of inclusion/exclusion as they pertain to distribution, reviews,. [THE SYNTAX SEEMS A LITTLE CONFUSING HERE. CLARIFY?] library acquisition, and academic conferences

PEN Oakland, A Bay Area Chapter of the International Organization of Poets, Essayists, and Novelists, was founded in 1989 to address multicultural issues and to educate the public as to the nature of multicultural work. These award-winning authors address the diversity and uniqueness of American culture and represent the new voices of American literature. The late Josephine Miles, in whose honor the awards are presented, was a highly regarded poet, critic, and professor of English at the University of California in Berkeley.

Past award-winners include Elmaz Abinader, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Juvenal Acosta, Opal Palmer Adisa, Francisco X. Alarcon, Yehuda Amichai, Alfred Arteaga, Marsha Lee Berkman, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Chana Bloch, Phyllis Burke, Marilyn Chin, Lucha Corpi, Kamau Daaood, Mike Davis, Chitra Divakaruni, Wendy Doniger, Nathan Englander, Ibrahim Fawal, Ruth Forman, Maketa Groves, Peter J. Harris, Joy Harjo, Chana Kronfeld, Dan Leone, Rabbi Michael Lerner, Leza Lowitz, William Mandel, Sylvia Lopez-Medina, Michael McClure, E. Ethelbert Miller, John Mulligan, Louis Owens, Robert Parry, Sylvia Watanabe, Brenda Lane Richardson, Jerome Rothenberg, Leslie Marmon Silko, Elaine Marcus Starkman, Clyde R. Taylor, Jervey Tervalon, Clifford E. Trafzer, Jose Garcia Villa, Alma Luz Villanueva, Gerald Vizenor, Gary Webb, Darryl Babe Wilson, and Koon Woon.

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FOR CALENDAR EDITORS:
WHAT: PEN Oakland’s 12th Annual Literary Awards
WHERE: PRO ARTS
461 9th Street (at Broadway) in Oakland
WHEN: Sunday, August 11, 6:00 PM–8:00 PM
Reception & book signing to follow
COST: $5–$8 sliding scale, donation at the door