The winner of this year’s prize is Frances Leviston’s “Mothers and Marimbas in ‘The Bight’: Bishop’s Danse Macabre.” The judge is Brian McHale, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University. His most recent books are The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodernism (2015) and The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, edited with Joe Bray and Alison Gibbon (2012). A cofounder of Ohio State’s Project Narrative, which he directed in 2012–14, he is also a founding member and former president of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP). He is currently coediting with Len Platt The Cambridge History of Postmodern Literature.
Professor McHale writes:
One convention of this sort of citation is to protest the virtual impossibility of selecting a “best” paper from among several excellent nominees—and I have no intention of breaking with tradition. I unreservedly admired all the...
