Windham Campbell Prizes

The Yale Review x Windham-Campbell Prizes

Michael Kelleher

in david raeburn’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the poet begins, “Changes of shape, new forms, are the theme which my spirit impels me / now to recite.” And he might as well be talking about the work of this year’s Windham Campbell Prize recipients as about the creation of the universe out of chaos. These artists are a group whose writing is bound by the theme of transformation.

While some of these remarkable writers work legibly within the categories for which they’ve been awarded the prize, others do not, either because they write fluently and easily in multiple genres or because their artistic practice is one of recombination and experimentation with the categories themselves, sometimes expanding these categories’ meanings and sometimes obsolescing them.

Their work has made me wonder, Why categorize writers at all? Why put labels on them—playwright, novelist, poet—and say anything other than that they write, and that we should support them in this endeavor?

The writing that excites us the most, the writing that stays with us, does so in part because it rubs up against our notions of the given and the known—that is, against our tendency to categorize and place things into neat little boxes for the sake of convenience. What happens when a novelist refuses the conventions of narrative? Or a poet writes a novel? What happens when a translator speaks in her own voice? Or when musical theater meets postmodern theory and afternoon soap operas?

The answer can be found in the work of the writers featured in this year’s special Windham Campbell Prizes issue of The Yale Review. If these writers have something in common it is that they are too busy exploring big ideas or constructing fantastically imagined architectures to worry themselves about what label may be attached to their names on a bookstore shelf, or what audiences might expect to see or hear or feel once they enter the theater. As in Ovid’s poem, changing the shapes of convention gives vitality to art, and to life.

essays

Real Character The sources of storytelling
Michael R. Jackson

The Novel as Arc Lamp The uncompromising innovations of Hélène Bessette
Kate Briggs

The Power of Testimony How narrative displaced invention
Vivian Gornick


fiction

Lili Is Crying
Hélène Bessette, translated by Kate Briggs

People in the Grasses
Renee Gladman

small life
Dionne Brand

The Boy, the Girls, the Dog, and I Was There
Canisia Lubrin

Drama

Revising Nat Turner The afterlives of first drafts
Nathan Alan Davis

poetry

1,723 Miles Away from Home
and
The Aeryon R80D Skyraider

Natalie Scenters-Zapico

This That We Have
Canisia Lubrin

conversations
Writing and the Space It Makes
Kate Briggs and Renee Gladman

Two Playwrights on Finding One's Voice
Nathan Alan Davis and Abe Koogler

Poetry in an Era of Anxiety
Natalie Scenters-Zapico and Dana Levin

Longer Than the Longest Rope
Dionne Brand and Canisia Lubrin

How the Pandemic Changed Theater
Michael R. Jackson and Lileana Blain-Cruz


interview

Vivian Gornick On how to become oneself
Meghan O’Rourke

Michael Kelleher is the program director of the Windham Campbell Prizes.
Originally published:
December 1, 2021

Featured

The Shapes of Grief

Witnessing the unbearable
Christina Sharpe

Writing in Pictures

Richard Scarry and the art of children’s literature
Chris Ware

Garth Greenwell

The novelist on writing about the body in crisis
Meghan O’Rourke

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