Press Releases
October 30, 2008Tenorio Wins Whiting Writers' Award
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact:
Elizabeth Smith
Assistant Vice President, College Communications
(925) 631-4826/(925) 518-2341
jes5@stmarys-ca.edu
Lysley Tenorio, associate professor of English at Saint Mary’s College of California, was named a recipient of the prestigious 2008 Whiting Writers’ Award. Tenorio, who received the award in New York City on Wednesday, is one of 10 emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise to receive the prize of $50,000 this year.
"I’m honored and humbled
by the award, and by the fact that the Whiting Foundation appreciates what I’m trying
to do in my fiction. It’s a wonderful and extremely generous gift," said Tenorio.
Tenorio recently completed a collection of short stories, some of which have appeared in Ploughshares, the Atlantic Monthly, the Chicago Tribune, and Manoa. Two have been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices. From his home in San Francisco, he writes primarily about first-generation Filipino immigrants in California. At Saint Mary’s, Tenorio currently teaches undergraduate English and creative writing in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. He is also working on a novel.
“The MFA Program and the English Department are thrilled that the Whiting Foundation chose to award Lysley one of their generous grants. The faculty and students at Saint Mary's have benefited from Lysley's talents for quite some time, and we're all very pleased that other institutions are aware of his terrific work,” said Graham Foust, associate professor of English and director of Saint Mary’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program.
Tenorio adds the Whiting Writers’ Award to an impressive list of accolades. He won a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a John Steinbeck Fellowship at San Jose State University, and an NEA Fellowship in addition to fellowships received from The University of Wisconsin at Madison, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. He was also the recipient of a Nelson Algren Short Story Award and was nominated for a National Magazine Award. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and his MFA from the University of Oregon.
Since its inception, the Whiting Writer’s Awards program has awarded more than $5 million to 240 poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights. Among the past recipients who have achieved acclaim and prominence in their field are Jonathan Franzen, Sarah Ruhl, William T. Vollmann, Colson Whitehead, Jorie Graham, Kim Edwards, Z Z Packer, Denis Johnson, Tobias Wolff, Michael Cunningham, Lydia Davis, and Jeffrey Eugenides.
To learn more about the Whiting Foundation and the selection process for the Whiting Writers’ Awards visit the website at: www.whitingfoundation.org.
San Francisco Chronicle article
