2023 James Jones First Novel Fellowship announcement

THE James Jones First Novel Fellowship has selected Catherine Carberry of Woodstock, N.Y., as the 2023 Fellow for her novel, Bitter Tropic. The first runner-up is Anna Badkhen of Philadelphia, Pa., for her novel, The Sound Keeps Coming. The second runner-up is J.C. Deane of New Jersey, for their novel, The Eleventh Horse. There were 637 submissions to the contest this year.

            The competition is co-sponsored by the James Jones Literary Society and the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University.

Catherine Carberry

            Carberry, awarded $10,000, has received fellowships from the Macdowell artist retreat, the Hedgebrook writing retreat, and Sewanee Writers Conference, where she was named the Susannah McCorkle Scholar. Her fiction has appeared in journals including Guernica, The Kenyon Review, Tin House online, North American Review, and Harvard Review, and has been broadcast on National Public Radio. 

            Carberry’s novel is based on the true story of the women leaders of Puerto Rico’s independence movement and the subsequent assassination attempt of President Truman. Contact: catherinejulia@gmail.com

               Badkhen, who will receive $3,000, is the author of seven nonfiction books, most recently Bright Unbearable Reality, long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award and for the 2023 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barry Lopez Visiting Writer in Ethics and Community Fellowship, and the Joel R. Seldin Award from Psychologists for Social Responsibility for writing about civilians in war zones. Badkhen was born in the Soviet Union and is a U.S. citizen.

            Badkhen’s novel is set on a single day in northwest Russia against the backdrop of imperial collapse. It is the story of a septuagenarian couple grappling with loss of love and memories of violence, while their teenage grand-niece looks for love amid echoes of wars past. Contact: https://www.annabadkhen.com/

            Deane, who will receive $2,000, holds bachelor’s degrees in visual design and psychology, and a Master of Social Work. Their writing experiences include work as a free-lance newspaper writer, collector of oral histories from Portuguese whaling men, and author in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews while working in the field of sleep research. Deane’s previous work as a child and family therapist has proven useful in writing a novel about loss, what makes “family,” and healing.

            Their novel, set amid rural Tuscany’s refined natural beauty and the knife edge of New York City, introduces peasant farmers Elena and Gianluca who’ve survived the perils of servitude and WWII Italy, only to suffer tragedy at war’s end—along with a bewildering reversal of fortune. Contact: JCDeaneAuthor@gmail.com

            The James Jones First Novel Fellowship was established in 1992 to “honor the spirit of unblinking honesty, determination, and insight into modern culture as exemplified by (the writings of) James Jones.” Jones was the author of From Here to Eternity as well as the novels Some Came Running and The Thin Red Line.

            Judges for the finalists were Nancy McKinley, Ph.D., J. Michael Lennon, Ph.D., and Laurie Loewenstein, M.A. McKinley is a founding faculty member of the Wilkes University Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Her most recent novel is St. Christopher on Pluto. Lennon is the co-founder of the Wilkes University Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. He is the late Norman Mailer’s archivist and authorized biographer and, most recently, author of Mailer’s Last Days: New and Selected Remembrances of a Life. Loewenstein is a retired member of the Maslow Family Creative Writing Program’s fiction faculty and president of the James Jones Literary Society. Her most recent novel is Funeral Train: A Dust Bowl Mystery.