6 emerging women writers win Jaffe awards

NEW YORK (AP) — Two poets, two fiction writers and two nonfiction writers have been named winners of this year’s Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards.

Each winner will receive $30,000.

The awards are given to emerging women writers who show “excellence and promise.” The winners announced Wednesday are fiction writers Olivia Clare and T.L. Khleif (kleef), nonfiction writers Karen Hays and Mara Naselli and poets Danielle Jones-Pruett and Solmaz Sharif.

Projects the winners have in the works range from a novel by Khleif about Syrian society and politics to essays by Hays about the “lore, language, and landscape” of Missouri’s Corn Belt.

Novelist Rona Jaffe established the awards in 1995. Previous winners include Tracy K. Smith, Lan Samantha Chang and ZZ Packer.

Jaffe died in 2005.

Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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