ADVERTISEMENTs
.png)
Keya Mitra wins Prairie Schooner’s 2024 Summer Essay Contest
Her winning essay, Bruised and Glorious, explores the physical and emotional dimensions of storytelling, offering a narrative of resilience and healing through communal experiences.
Keya Mitra / Image- Nebraska Today
Indian American author Keya Mitra has been named the winner of 2024 Summer Nonfiction Essay Contest organized by Prairie Schooner, a nationally renowned literary quarterly published by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for her essay, ‘Bruised and Glorious’.
The essay, a part of her memoir-in-essays manuscript titled ‘Almost Born’, delves into themes of fertility struggles, chronic illness, and the communal healing experienced during Camino Santiago pilgrimages.
Mitra will receive a prize of $1,000, and her essay will be published in the spring 2025 edition of Prairie Schooner.
Founded in 1926, the journal showcases fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews from emerging and established writers across the globe.
The contest was judged by Safiya Sinclair, an award-winning poet and professor of creative writing at Arizona State University. She praised the essay as "a love letter to the way language connects us, and gifts us a roadmap to ourselves; a way back to the home we thought we’d lost."
“From the first sentence of Bruised and Glorious, I was drawn in by the sharp, exquisite language and the compelling exploration of the ways our own bodies, through illness, alienation, and colonial trauma, can be a site of exile. This essay is a beautiful, brilliantly moving work about the many ways that collective storytelling can create pathways to healing and to understanding ourselves in the world,” Sinclair said.
Mitra, an award-winning professor of creative writing and literature at Pacific University, holds an MFA and doctorate from the University of Houston. Her works have appeared in the Kenyon Review and received notable mentions in Best American Short Stories 2018.
Her accolades include the 2021 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and the 2022 Arnold L. Graves and Lois S. Graves Award in the Humanities, which supported her research in Meghalaya, India. A recipient of a Fulbright grant, Mitra is also working on a novel-in-progress titled Immigrant Delay Disease.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
E Paper
ADVERTISEMENT
.jpg)
Video
.png)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
Comments
Start the conversation
Become a member of New India Abroad to start commenting.
Sign Up Now
Already have an account? Login