We are excited to announce the recipients of the 2021 Big Other Literary Citizenship Awards. This award aims to recognize outstanding efforts toward supporting the work of innovative writers and adventurous presses, through reviewing, editing, publishing, and/or promoting books, as well as encouraging, building, and sustaining a robust literary culture.

These exemplary literary citizens will be celebrated at the 2021 Big Other Book Awards Ceremony (date and location TBD).

And the awardees are: Cave Canem, Fiction Collective 2, Daniel Green, and Suzanne Jill Levine.

Cave Canem

From their website:

Founded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996 to remedy the under-representation and isolation of African American poets in the literary landscape, Cave Canem Foundation is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.

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Cave Canem enjoys over 20 local, regional and national cultural partnerships, among them the Brooklyn Book Festival, where we are a Programming Partner; the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, where we are a Literary Partner; and collaborative residencies for fellows at such sites as the Millay Colony for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and The Home School.

Cave Canem’s programs and publications enlarge the American literary canon; democratize archives; and expand for students, aspiring poets and readers the notion of what’s possible and valuable in a poem. In Cave Canem, poets of color find productive space for writing without fear of censure or the need to defend subject matter or language—an intellectual and physical site where they validate their own and their peers’ voices and deeply know that s/he is not “the only one.” Established in 1996, our flagship program is a writing retreat in Greensburg and Pittsburgh, PA, that today annually serves 36 emerging African American poets. Core programs comprise three book prizes delivered in partnership with five prestigious presses; community-based workshops for emerging adult poets; Legacy Conversations with legendary poets and scholars; New Works readings showcasing poetry by contemporary African American practitioners; cross-cultural Poets on Craft conversations with poets of color in mid-career; a popular lecture series; and a Poets Tour representing over 70 fellows.

Cave Canem is part of a national coalition of poetry organizations working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.

Fiction Collective 2

From their website:

A small, not-for-profit publisher run by authors, Fiction Collective Two is a hub for artistically adventurous, non-traditional fiction. Since its origin in 1974, membership of the collective has grown from six founding author-members to well over a hundred today; we have published more than two hundred books, and continue to publish six new books every year (three in fall and three in spring). We are committed to finding fresh and experimental works, both through member-sponsored submissions and through two annual competitions, the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize. Published titles remain in print in perpetuity.

Daniel Green

From Green’s website:

Daniel Green is a literary critic whose essays and reviews over the past three decades have appeared in a variety of publications, in print and online. He has maintained The Reading Experience since 2004.

He has a PhD in modern/contemporary literature from the University of Missouri. Including his time as a graduate student, he was a college instructor for almost 40 years.

Although he began his a career as an aspiring scholar (and published a number of scholarly articles in pursuit of that goal), he now considers himself a general interest critic who still tries to incorporate some of the more rigorous practices (thick description, citation of evidence and illustration) that he perceived were called for in academic criticism.

Suzanne Jill Levine

From Wikipedia:

Suzanne Jill Levine is an American writer, poet, literary translator, and scholar.

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A scholar of Latin American literature, her books include one of the first studies of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Adolfo Bioy Casares, both published in Spanish. She is also a leading specialist in Translation Studies and Comparative Literature. Her 1991 book, The Subversive Scribe, was influential on the development of translation theory in the United States and elsewhere. She has written two poetry chapbooks and hundreds of essays in major anthologies and journals. She is a translator of a range of writers including Silvina Ocampo, Clarice Lispector, Cecilia Vicuña, Jorge Luis Borges, Manuel Puig, Adolfo Bioy Casares, Carlos Fuentes, José Donoso, Julio Cortázar and Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Levine is an honorary member of She has been recipient of numerous grants and awards from the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA) and for the Humanities (NEH).