Thursday, November 3, 2016

Meet The Story Prize Judges: Harold Augenbraum, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Daniel Goldin

The Story Prize is pleased to announce its judges for 2016: Former National Book Foundation Executive Director Harold Augenbraum, Author Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and bookseller Daniel Goldin of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company.

Here come the judges: Harold Augenbraum, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, and Daniel Goldin

These judges will decide the winner of the $20,000 top prize from among the three books that we (Director Larry Dark and Founder Julie Lindsey) choose as finalists in January. The other two finalists will receive $5,000.

We will announce the winner at the end of an evening of readings and onstage interviews on March 8, 2017, at The New School in New York City.

About the Judges

Harold Augenbraum is a Franke Visiting Fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University. From 2004 to early 2016, he was Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, presenter of the National Book Awards. He has published seven books on Latino literature of the United States and has translated, among other works, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Chronicle of the Narváez Expedition and the Filipino novelist José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. He has taught U.S. Latino literature at Amherst College, founded the Proust Society of America, and co-chaired, with Susan Shillinglaw, the 2002 National Steinbeck Centennial celebration. He often speaks and writes on the future of literary reading and publishing and is currently carrying out a research project on the business of translation in the United States under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In 2015, Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota awarded him the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum is the author of two novels, Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Madeleine Is Sleeping, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories 2004, 2009, and 2016. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Fellowship, she was named one of “20 Under 40” fiction writers by The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles with her family.

Daniel Goldin has been the proprietor of Milwaukee’s Boswell Book Company since 2009. Previous to Boswell, he spent 23 years with Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops, primarily as a buyer, and before that, he was a publicist at a publishing house that is now part of Hachette Book Group. He has received the Christopher Latham Sholes Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers for encouraging and supporting Wisconsin writers and a James L. Patterson bookseller bonus. He was raised in Queens, New York, and graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in math and Russian.