Full of heartache and hope, the collection of short stories touches on themes of class, sexuality, and gender, while highlighting the universal need for human connection.

Crotty is the winner of the Ģ����ý’s 2018 for her work (University of Iowa Press, 2017).

“It’s an amazing bookshelf of authors who’ve won, like Ann Patchett, Jessamyn West, Toni Morrison, and Mia Alvar,” says Crotty. “I was very surprised and very happy.”

Awarded annually by the Ģ����ý’s , and the , the prize recognizes American women who are launching promising writing careers. It was created in 1976 to honor its namesake, a young editor who was killed in a car accident just as her career was blossoming.

What Counts as Love—also the winner of the 2017 John Simmons Short Fiction Award and a semi-finalist for the 2018 PEN America Literary Awards—carries nine unique tales centered on mostly young women. In the title story, a young woman begins a job on a construction site after leaving an abusive marriage. Two 11-year-old girls spy on a neighbor’s sex life in “Crazy for You,” as they both explore their own sexuality. In “A New Life,” a mother’s grief after her infant’s death leads her to reconsider her marriage and understand her husband in a new light.

Crotty’s book was selected by the prize committee, made up of Ģ����ý faculty members , an assistant professor of art, and��, an associate professor of English, as well as English teacher ��from Pittsford Sutherland High School. Mannheimer says Crotty places women’s narratives in the foreground in a complicated and interesting way.

“You get the sense that these characters are living in a world that is less visible, either because they come from disadvantaged backgrounds or they’re not living in major cities,” says Mannheimer. “They’re dealing with different sets of hardships that are keeping them back in some way, whether it’s abuse or drug addiction or an eating disorder. It sheds a light on other perspectives you may not otherwise hear.”

Crotty has published several short essays, such as “Love at a Distance” and “It’s New Year’s Eve, and This is Dubai.” A recipient of a Fulbright research grant, she lives in Baltimore, Maryland, and is currently working on a novel.

Eight out of nine of the stories in this collection are focused on female characters. What inspired you to make this choice?

I was really just writing about what was going on with people I knew. The only feminist choice I made was to revisit the pressure to write about men. I think men don’t really have the pressure to write about women, but women are pressured to believe that male stories are more interesting or more important. I was trying to resist that.

In this collection, you touch on many topics that concern gender, from sexual assault to eating disorders. Were you hoping to reach young women with these stories?

Of course. If people see themselves represented in the book and want to read it, that’s great. But I hope men are curious about the inner lives of women. Women’s lives are just as complicated as men’s, but I think women are often taught from a young age to censor themselves and to think of how they’re perceived by other people, and because of that there’s often a lot going on in women’s inner worlds that’s often not acted upon, or said out loud. I wanted to try to show some of that in fiction, and I was trying to show that these people’s lives and these people’s stories were worth telling.

The one male narrator of�� “The House Always Wins” is very different from the other eight, in that he is outwardly polite while dealing with aggressive thoughts. How did you come to create this complex character?

Most of these stories start with a story or situation, and that one started with the news of these fires that destroyed several mansions. It was devastating in part because the houses were so big. I was trying to write about that area, and I was trying to imagine someone who would have felt out of place even before these weird things started happening. The character is someone surrounded by what he sees as greed and entitlement, but then also sees that same entitlement in himself and his sexuality, and he’s disturbed by it. I see people’s love of money and need to get money sometimes as the same type of entitlement and aggression that people have in their relationships. He was scared of what he was capable of.

Many of the protagonists come from a low socioeconomic background. Why the focus on class?

I often think about class and money because it dictates, for many people, either what is possible or what seems possible—or what they feel obligated to do, what they feel entitled to do. I also think class is complicated, and it doesn’t coincide just with what you have. It also coincides with education, possibility, and knowledge you’ve inherited from your family, so I think it’s complicated. But each of these stories came out of situations, or people, or circumstances that were interesting to me.

You have a long history of writing essays and short stories, several of which focus on young women and stressors in their relationships. What was your creative process in putting these many pieces together for this collection?

The advice that I’ve gotten from other people is to look for both the differences and commonalities. I think the commonality piece is actually a lot easier than making sure they’re different enough. All the stories come from you and your subconscious, and the ideas and experiences and imagination that’s available to you. So I think it’s highly unusual that someone would write twelve stories and nine of them aren’t clearly connected in some way. That part was easier for me. The harder part was making sure that the stories felt different and weren’t covering the same ground.

��Are you already working on something else? What’s next?

I’m working on one new story I want to write, and one story that I’m mostly done with, and then some essays. Once I do that, I’m going to go back to a novel that I’m working on. It’s been exciting to work on a longer project, so we’ll see what happens.

• Read more about past Kafka Prize winners

As a young attorney at a Washington, D.C., law firm, had no notion of becoming a prize-winning author. But only a few years into her practice, she realized law wasn’t her passion. She enrolled in an MFA program at American University, while continuing to work as a lawyer part-time to finance her studies.

Now an associate professor of creative writing at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, the poet and novelist can add “award-winning” to her resume.

Poliner is the winner of the 2017 for her novel (Little, Brown & Co., 2016). She will be on campus on Wednesday, November 1st for the awards ceremony and a reading, followed by refreshments and a book signing.

The prize—awarded annually by the Ģ����ý’s Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and the Department of English—recognizes American women on the precipice of promising writing careers. It was created in 1976 to honor its namesake, a young editor who was killed in a car accident just as her career was blossoming. Previous winners include the Nobel Prize- and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist Toni Morrison, for Song of Solomon, and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author Ann Patchett, for Taft.

“I’m thrilled to have been selected,” says Poliner.

A multigenerational saga that extends beyond the confines of its small locale, As Close to Us as Breathing chronicles the yearly summer pilgrimage of one family to their seaside cottage in Woodmont, Connecticut. It balances the melancholy in a post-World War II Jewish community with the optimistic themes of a beach novel: summer, young love, and baseball. Yet, the characters����struggle to do what is expected of them, rather than what they desire.

The prize committee consisting of Ģ����ý faculty members , (Professor of Spanish), , (Associate Professor of English), and (Visiting Assistant Professor of German), calls the novel “nothing short of epic.” Meanwhile,��adio calls it “a marvel of artful storytelling,” and the praises Poliner for the “warm, particularized light in which she dresses her many characters.”

Poliner’s impressive cast of characters—four children, three sisters, two husbands, and more—presented her with a creative challenge. “It took a long time to imagine their lives fully,” says Poliner, who took six years to write the book, but conceived of the idea ten years before that.

Although the author doesn’t play favorites—“even the flawed characters are near and dear to my heart”—the author concedes that she most enjoyed writing Bec Syrkin, a savvy seamstress. “I identified with the fact that she found her way into her work and had a knack for making things. I always admired her,” says Poliner.

Another challenge was the narration style. The story is relayed in the first person through adult Molly who tells the story in�� hindsight, often looking back on the summer of 1948 when she was twelve years old.

“It took some time and a little bit of technical practice,” Poliner admits, who teaches MFA students.

The setting of Woodmont, Connecticut, was the site of Poliner’s own childhood summers, two weeks each year, at her grandmother’s cottage. But that’s where the similarities end.

“A lot of people want to know if I’ve written about my life—who’s who, what character stems from what person in my life—but it’s really largely imagined,” says Poliner. She muses that some readers may question the integrity of fiction because they have lost sight of the power of imagination.

Ultimately, literature is where we learn about humanity, she adds, and how to think critically about it. “Reading literature is a wonderful way to broaden oneself by experiencing a new world presented in a book,” says Poliner.

The Kafka Prize ceremony, reading, book-signing, and reception will take place on Wednesday, November 1st at 6:00 p.m. in the Hawkins-Carlson Room of the Rush Rhees Library. The event is free and open to the public.��

Alvar’s collection “stood out as the selection committee’s unanimous choice among almost 150 entries for its ability to craft a cohesive, intricately wrought world out of nine separate narratives,” explained Professor of Spanish Beth Jörgensen. She—along with fellow committee members Katherine Mannheimer, associate professor of English, and Jason Peck, visiting assistant professor of German—took only five minutes to agree on this year’s selection.

In her introductory remarks during the ceremony and reading, Jörgensen called In the Country a “fresh and valuable work of fiction for an English reading audience, in part because it provides insights into the rarely written lives of first-generation Filipino immigrants.” Alvar herself was born in the Philippines and raised in Bahrain, before moving to the United States to study and earn her undergraduate degree at Harvard University and an MFA from Columbia University.

Remarking on the quality of Alvar’s writing, Jörgensen noted, “She crafts a beautiful lucid prose that is what we might typically call ‘poetic.’ Her descriptions of characters and places are both rich and economical in their use of language.” Jörgensen read aloud the following passage from the first story in the collection as an illustration:

In the decade since I left she hadn’t aged, exactly. To my eyes she seemed not older but more. More frail; more tired; softer-spoken; her dark, teaspoon-shaped face cast farther down. Every feature I remembered had settled in her and been more deeply confirmed.

Expressing her gratitude during the ceremony, Alvar said, “I really see this book as the product of the efforts of so many of the amazing women in my life.” She also admitted to “fangirling over the list of women writers who received this prize before,” which includes Toni Morrison for Song of Solomon, Ann Tyler for Morgan’s Passing, Ursula K. Le Guin for Always Coming Home, Ann Patchett for Taft, and Nell Freudenberger for The Dissident.

Alvar read from the beginnings of three stories from the collection—“The Kontrabida,” “Legends of the White Lady,” and “Shadow Families”—before answering questions from the audience of students, faculty, staff, and community members. She offered her insights on writing, saying, “I knew that I was going to be focusing on the diaspora and on immigrant and migrant lives. Knowing that kind of geographic connection freed me up to not really think about a theme. When my agent and editor were talking about order, I knew I wanted ‘The Kontrabida’ to be first and ‘In the Country’ (the title story and the longest) to be last.”

In the Country was written over a span of about ten years, during which time Alvar grew as a writer. “There were a lot of moments from the earlier stories where I felt like I was still learning and not seeing solutions that are a little more obvious to me now. That’s where having an editor helped. She was seeing everything at the same time and able to help me with the things that were written early in my development.” Alvar highlighted the contributions of her agent and editor, both of whom “share many of the qualities that Janet Heininger Kafka possessed.”

The idea for the Kafka prize came out of the personal grief of the friends and family of Heininger Kafka, a young editor killed in an automobile accident just as her career was beginning to achieve its promise of excellence. She was 30 years old, and those who knew her believed she would do much to further the causes of literature and women. Her family, friends, and professional associates in the publishing industry created the endowment from which the prize is bestowed.

“It’s been an incredible honor for me to accept this prize from the institute, as someone who minored in women’s studies as an undergraduate and who, from the time that I first started writing fiction, was drawn to depicting the lives of mothers, daughters, and sisters,” said Alvar.

*Correction, November 1, 2016: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that In the Country was the first short story collection to receive the Kafka Prize. In fact, The Instinct for Bliss, a collection of short stories by Melissa Pritchard, won the prize for a book published in 1995.

Townsend will receive the award of $7,500 on Tuesday, Oct. 27 at 5 p.m. in the Hawkins Carlson Room in Rush Rhees Library on the University’s River Campus. The event is free and open to the public. Townsend will give a reading from her novel and she will sign copies of the book at the reception to follow.

Saint Monkey (Norton, 2014) was selected for the Kafka Prize by a panel of three reviewers from a pool of more than 100 nominations. “One of the remarkable qualities of the novel is��Townsend’s ability to give each female character her own unique voice, while focusing on the intensity and complexity of their mutual friendship,” says Jason Peck, chair of the selection committee. The novel follows the lives of two young girls in the 1950s Jim Crow South and is split between their two perspectives and mutual quest for “something better.”

Although she has always written stories, Townsend said she never grew up thinking she would be a writer and was therefore taken aback by the reception her first novel has received. “I feel very fortunate to now be living out my dream and to be able to hear from readers whose lives have been touched by the story I told.” ��She hopes people are able to take away from her book a feeling that “we are all deeply flawed, yet all completely loveable.”

Before writing Saint Monkey, Townsend was a lawyer, a broadcast journalist, and a Fulbright Fellow in Cộte d’Ivore. She has taught at a number of universities throughout the Midwest at Indiana University where she is an associate professor of English, and is currently working on her second novel.

Among its numerous accolades, Saint Monkey has received honors from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, was long listed for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and short-listed for the Crook’s Corner Book Prize.

Each year The Susan B. Anthony Institute awards the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize to an American woman whose book-length prose writing has been published the previous year. The winner must be a talented writer who has not yet become well established in the literary realm.�� Previous winners include Anne Tyler, Ann Patchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Toni Morrison, all of whom won the award before achieving fame for their writing.

The award was established in the memory of Janet Heidinger Kafka, a young and promising editor who was killed in an automobile accident just as her career was beginning to gather momentum. The endowment that funds the award was set up by her friends and family to honor her memory, her personal ideals and her high standard for literature.

This year’s selection committee panelists included Jason Peck, a visiting professor��of German, Beth Jörgensen, professor of Spanish, and Terry Platt, professor Emeritus of Biochemistry and Biology.

Freeman will receive the award and $7,500 prize on Thursday, Oct. 23 at 5 p.m. in the Wells Brown Room of Rush Rhees Library on the University’s River Campus. The event is free and open to the public. As part of the award ceremony, Freeman will give a reading from the novel and she will sign copies of her book during a reception after the event.

On Sal Mal Lane (Graywolf Press, 2013) was selected for the University’s Kafka Prize by a panel of three reviewers from among 121 nominations. “In this haunting novel of a Sri Lankan neighborhood in the years leading up to the country’s civil war, Ru Freeman explores the interactions, small events and increasing national tensions that gradually transform life on Sal Mal Lane,” writes Kathy McGowan, chair of the Kafka Prize committee.

Speaking about the book, Freeman said that she wanted readers from many parts of the world to be able to relate to the way that life unfolds for the characters in her book, to feel that these children and this neighborhood could be their own.�� “I chose to focus on the children because their innocence in times of conflict helped me to maintain a certain distance from the situation, and to leave out my own opinions,” said Freeman. “It allowed me to have compassion for everyone involved.”

Freeman is a freelance journalist, speaker, teacher, and activist. Her creative writing has been featured in VQR, Guernica, and World Literature Today,��and she blogs for the Huffington Post on literature and politics. She is a fellow at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, an artist in residence at Yaddo and Hedgebrook and a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her first novel, A Disobedient Girl (2009), and On Sal Mal Lane were long listed for the DCS prize for South Asian Literature and translated into multiple languages, including Italian and Hebrew.

The University’s Janet Heidinger Kafka prize recognizes an American woman writer whose book-length work has been published in the previous year. Previous winners include Anne Tyler, Ann Patchett, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Toni Morrison, all of who won the award before becoming famous for their prose. The award honors Janet Heidinger Kafka, a young editor who was killed in an automobile accident as her career was beginning. Kafka’s friends and family created the endowment that supports the award in memory of her high literary standards and personal ideals.

This year’s selection committee was led by McGowan, education and women’s studies librarian at the University’s Rush Rhees Library, with Terry Platt, professor of biochemistry and biology at Rochester, and Katherine Manheimer, associate professor of English at Rochester.