We are delighted to announce Big Other‘s Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Awardees!

The award honors exemplary living writers, who have made a significant contribution to literature and are continuing to shape and direct the conversation about literary art, about language, form, structure, style, and more.

Championing authors at the height of their careers is part of the Big Other’s longstanding efforts to celebrate literary art; promote innovation, creativity, diversity, and inclusivity; and engage and inspire more discerning readers.

These writers will be honored at the Inaugural Big Other Book Awards Ceremony.

Here are our Honorees for 2019:

Giannina Braschi

Called “one of the most revolutionary voices in Latin America today,” by the PEN organization, experimental Puerto Rican writer Giannina Braschi is the author of Empire of Dreams; United States of Banana; and Yo-Yo Boing!, the first Spanglish novel. Her genre-trespasspassing corpus foregrounds the lives of Latin American immigrants in the United States, fusing fiction, poetry, theater, and nonfiction. Based in New York City, Braschi has taught at Rutgers University, City University of New York, and Colgate University.

Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany’s vast oeuvre includes “space opera with neo-slave narrative, memoir, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,” writes Jordy Rosenberg in The New York Times, “and an elegy for the sexuality of pre-Giuliani Times Square.” Winner of many awards, ​Delany is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including Dhalgren; Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders; Dark Reflections; Babel-17; The Einstein Intersection; Nova; Equinox; Hogg; Aye and Gomorrah and Other Stories; About Writing; Times Square Red / Times Square Blue; The Motion of Light in Water; The Mad Man; Atlantis: Three Tales; Phallos; and the four-volume series Return to Nevèrÿon. Subject of the 2007 documentary The Polymath, Delany lives in Philadelphia with his partner, Dennis Rickett.

Listen to Big Other‘s podcast with Delany. And read Delany’s Big Other essay on Junot Díaz’s writing.

Keith Waldrop

Winner of the National Book Award in Poetry for his 2009 collection Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, Keith Waldrop is the author of numerous acclaimed books of poetry and prose, among them The House Seen from Nowhere; The Real Subject: Queries and Conjectures of Jacob Delafon, with Sample Poems; Several Gravities; The Not Forever [Inventions]; and Selected Poems. He has also translated the writing of Charles Baudelaire, Claude Royet-Journoud, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Edmond Jabès, among others. Co-founder of Burning Deck, which specializes in the publication of experimental poetry and prose, Waldrop lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with Rosmarie Waldrop, and is professor emeritus at Brown University.

Rosmarie Waldrop

Acclaimed poet, translator, and publisher Rosmarie Waldrop is the author of numerous books, among them A Key Into the Language of America; Another Language: Selected Poems; Split Infinites; Reluctant Gravities; Love, Like Pronouns; Blindsight; Curves to the Apple; and Driven to Abstraction. She has also translated the writing of Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Jacques Roubaud, among others. Co-founder of Burning Deck, which specializes in the publication of experimental poetry and prose, Waldrop lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with Keith Waldrop.

John Yau

Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over fifty books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. His critically-acclaimed oeuvre includes Radiant Silhouette: Selected Work, 1974-1988; In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol; Hawaiian Cowboys; Forbidden Entries; The United States of Jasper Johns; My Symptoms; Borrowed Love Poems; Further Adventures in Monochrome; and Bijoux in the Dark. Yau edits Hyperallergic Weekend, runs  Black Square Editions, and teaches art history and criticism at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.

Read four poems by John Yau published in Big Other.