Ayanna Dozier, PhD, 2020 winner of the Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Writing.
Gulf Coast, a student-run, non-profit journal of literature and fine arts out of University of Houston’s English Department, has announced its 2020 prize winners for the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, and the Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Art Writing. The journal will publish the winners in the Spring 2021 issue of Gulf Coast (Issue 33.2).
The writer, lecturer, curator, filmmaker, and performance artist Ayanna Dozier, PhD, won this year’s Toni Beauchamp Prize in Critical Writing. “Original in thought and courageous in its departure from the beaten path, Ayanna Dozier’s Sound Garden: Ja’Tovia Gary’s The Giverny Document greets our moment head on,” states Franklin Sirmans, juror of the Beauchamp Prize. “This essay will pique the interest of the aficionado though it bounds with enough creative verve for any careful reader.”
Honorable Mentions for the Beauchamp Prize are US-based, Scottish art critic Darren Jones for Is it Time to End the Whitney Biennial?, and former Houston Chronicle art critic Devon Britt-Darby for Philip Guston Eventually. Last year’s winner was Ra Malik Imhotep, whose essay On Retrieval took the 2019 prize.
Kristen Renee Miller, left, and J. Bret Maney, winners of the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation, 2020.
In addition to the Beauchamp Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Translation was also awarded. Founded in 2014, the Prize in Translation is a $1,000 award that comes with a publication in Gulf Coast. This year’s winners are poet Kristen Renee Miller for her translation of Marie-Andrée Gill’s poems, and J. Bret Maney for his translation of Fiston Mwanza Mujila’s poems.
Writing about the winners, juror Urayoán Noel states: “Kristen Renee Miller’s translations retain the elegance and shimmer of the originals while wondrously conveying their knottedness, their syntax of skin.”
Kieran Mundy, winner of the Barthelme Prize for short prose, 2020.
Jenny Offill, juror of the Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, awarded the prize to Kieran Mundy for Like Yourself. The prize honors Donald Barthelme, writer and former reporter for the Houston Post, as well as former director of the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.
Kat Lewis and Jannesa Regios were awarded honorable mention — Lewis for Multiple Gwishin, and Regios for The Storm.
For more on Gulf Coast, please visit their website here.
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Founded by Phillip Lopate and Donald Barthelme in 1986, Gulf Coast is a journal of literature, art, and critical art writing, publishing contributors who represent a flow of international cultures, voices, and aesthetics. Through programs and publications, and in collaboration with the University of Houston, Gulf Coast brings consequential art and writing to an engaged audience.
