Marina Budhos is an author of award-winning fiction and nonfiction, including Watched, which received a Walter Award Honor, Ask Me No Questions, and Tell Us We’re Home. With her co-author Marc Aronson, she published Eyes of the World: Robert Capa, Gerda Taro & The Invention of Modern Photojournalism, and Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom & Science, which was a finalist for an LA Times Book Award.

Her next novel is The Long Ride (Random House, 2019). Budhos has been a Fulbright Scholar to India, and is a professor of English at William Paterson University.

The Value of Support

"The Rona Jaffe Award arrived at a crucial period in my life—it allowed me to travel to Guyana, where I did some important family research that resulted in finishing my second novel, The Professor of Light, and it also resulted in one long journalism work and an essay. It was an affirmation that the search I was on—excavating and grasping my father's background and the political milieu from which he came—was not for naught. And as a woman, shaky in her sense of adult self at the time, her sense of being a full-on writer, this was truly life-changing."

News

My new YA novel, The Long Ride, about three mixed race girls during a 1970s integration battle, will be published by Wendy Lamb Books/Random House in 2019.

1996 Award Winners

Marina Budhos

fiction

Laura Mullen

poetry

Lois-Ann Yamanaka

fiction

Olena Kalytiak Davis

poetry

Eileen Pollack

nonfiction/fiction

Angela Yuan

poetry

Tory Dent

poetry/nonfiction

Mary Szybist

poetry