The American Literature Society is excited to announce that it will accept essay submissions for the 1921 Prize in American literature for the 2023 calendar year. The winning essay will have demonstrated (1) an exceptional level of critical engagement with literary tradition(s) and trends in one of the several subdisciplines comprising American literature and/or (2) forged an innovative scholarly trajectory in the field more generally. The ALS board recognizes the mutually constitutive relationship between literature and social change, and thus invites work which, in its critical interrogation of American literature, adumbrates how literary innovation shapes, and is shaped by, civic education and social resistance both within and beyond the US’s national borders. To that end, the board has selected the theme “Democracy, Difference, and the Question of Belonging.”
The longstanding issue of who “belongs” in the United States is vexed, and rooted in the very founding of this nation-state, as evidenced by the Naturalization Act of 1790 which limited citizenship to “White persons.” In recent years, the ongoing public debates over the meaning and scope of belonging have become increasingly contentious and controversial with the rise white nationalism and right-wing extremism. Essays submitted for consideration should shed light on the diverse, intersectional, and/or transnational ways “belonging” has performed as a contested (and contestatory) space in the reproduction of North American identities and epistemologies in relationship to democracy and social transformation.
In keeping with this year’s theme, the board has expanded its acceptance of submissions beyond work produced by tenured and non-tenured faculty to include a third category soliciting essays from higher education faculty at various levels, including adjuncts, term faculty, independent scholars, librarians and archivists. We will also accept submissions from scholars whose careers have followed along other professional routes, including (but not limited to) artists, journalists, community activists as well as those who work in the private sector.
Below are the guidelines for submissions:
- Submissions must be published during the calendar year of 2023. For submissions that have not yet appeared in print by the submission deadline below, authors are requested to provide verification that their essay will be published within the calendar year.
- No person may nominate more than one essay in a given year.
- ALS will accept published essays from the following journals: African American Review; American Literary History (ALH); American Literary Realism; American Literature; American Periodicals; Arizona Quarterly; Callaloo; Contemporary Literature; Early American Literature; ELH; ESQ; ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment; J19; Journal of Ethnic American Literature; Legacy; MELUS; Mississippi Quarterly; Modern Language Quarterly; Modernism/Modernity; Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS); Nineteenth-Century Literature; NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction; Post45; PMLA; Resources for American Literary Study; Studies in American Fiction; Studies in American Indian Literatures; Studies in the Novel; Twentieth-Century Literature; and journals devoted to specific authors (e.g., Leviathan, The Emily Dickinson Journal). Essays which do not appear in the abovementioned journals will be considered on the condition that they demonstrate a clear (and forthright) engagement with US/American literary traditions and trends in either a journal of equivalent stature from another discipline or in a magazine with a strong reputation for publishing influential work in the field of American studies.
- Authors must be members of the American Literature Society. If you haven’t already, please join! Membership is free—just follow this link.
Please send an electronic copy of the nominated essay (PDF preferred) to the Prize Committee by October 23rd to the1921prize@gmail.com
The email, the1921prize@yahoo.com is no longer in use. Please use our google email address to submit your publication.
If you have any questions, please contact Cathryn Merla-Watson, Chair of the 1921 Prize Committee, cathryn.merlawatson@utrgv.edu
2023 Winners
Contingent/Non-TT
Winner:
- Alex Moskowitz, “The Racial Economy of Perception: Reading Black Sociality in the Nineteenth Century,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction
Honorable Mention:
- Juan Carlos Fermin, “‘We Are America!’: Carlos Bulosan’s Multicultural Vision and the Challenges of Afropessimism,” Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States READ FREE for the next month
TT
Winners:
- Alyssa A. Hunziker, “Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold,” Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States READ FREE for the next month
- Carlos Alonso Nugent, “The Limits of Latinx Representation,” American Literary History READ FREE for the next month
Honorable Mention:
- Stephen Pasqualina, “Before the Ship and Plantation: Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon and Blackness as Totality,” Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States READ FREE for the next month
Tenured
Winner:
- Selina Lai-Henderson, “‘You Are No Darker Than I am’: The Souls of Black Folk in Maoist China,” PLMA
Honorable Mentions:
- Travis M. Foster, “White Supremacist Submission,” Transgender Studies Quarterly
- Melani McAlister, “Narrative Disorders: Surveillance, Truth, and Democracy in Malka Older’s Centenal Cycle,” American Literary History READ FREE for the next month!
The awards committee included Amanda Ellis, Kara Johnson, Howard Rambsy, Frances Tran, and Cathryn Merla-Watson (chair).
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2022 Winners
Category 1: Untenured Scholars
Co-Winners:
Camille S. Owens, “‘I, Young in Life’: Phillis Wheatley and the Invention of American Childhood,” Early American Literature 57.3 (2022): 727-749
Alexander Mazzaferro, “‘A Nat Turner in Every Family’: Exemplarity and Exceptionality in the Print Circulation of Slave Revolt,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 10.2 (2022): 267-303
Category 2: Tenured Scholars
Winner: Sarah Wasserman, “Critical Darlings, Critical Dogs: Joseph O’Neill and What Contemporary Criticism Doesn’t Want,” American Literary History 34.2 (Summer 2022): 561-585.
Honorable Mention: Cindy Weinstein, “La Reproduction Interdite: Magritte’s Reproduction of Pym,” Poe Studies 55 (2022): 32-58.
1921 Prize Committee
Cody Marrs, Chair (University of Georgia)
Adrienne Brown (University of Chicago)
Nan Z. Da (Notre Dame)
Rafael Walker (Baruch College, CUNY)
Fiona Green (Cambridge)
2021 Winners
Category 1: Tenured Scholars
Award Winners: Katherine Fusco and Lynda C. Olman for “Techniques of Justice: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits and the Problem of Visualizing the Race,” MELUS 46.3 (Fall 2021).
Honorable Award Recognition: Laura M. Furlan, “The Archives of Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Vol 33, no 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2021).
Category 2: Untenured Scholars/Contingent Faculty/Graduate Student Scholars
Award Winner: Laura B. McGrath, “Literary Agency,” American Literary History, Vol 33, no 2 (Summer 2021).
Award Winner: Paul Nadal, “Cold War Remittance Economy: U.S. Creative Writing and the Importation of New Criticism into the Philippines,” American Quarterly, Vol 73, no 3 (Sept 2021).
2020 Winners
Two in the tenured faculty category:
Sari Altschuler, Associate Professor of English at Northeastern University
“Touching the Scarlet Letter: What Disability History Can Teach Us About Literature,” in American Literature 1 March 2020; 92 (1): 91–122. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8056602
AND
Sarah E. Chinn, Chair of the English Department at Hunter College (CUNY)
“Enslavement and the Temporality of Childhood,” in American Literature 1 March 2020; 92 (1): 33–59. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8056588
Untenured/contingent faculty category:
Ajay Kumar Batra, Department of English graduate student, University of Pennsylvania
“Reading with Conviction: Abraham Johnstone and the Poetics of the Dead End,” in Early American Literature, vol. 55 no. 2, 2020, p. 331-354. doi:10.1353/eal.2020.0052
Honorable Mention in untenured/contingent faculty category (new this year):
Mike Taylor, Assistant Professor & Terence Wride, MA student
“‘Indian Kids Can’t Write Sonnets’: Re-membering the Poetry of Henry Tinhorn from the Intermountain Indian School,” in American Quarterly, vol. 72 no. 1, 2020, p. 25-53. doi:10.1353/aq.2020.0002.
The 1921 Award Committee
Helane Androne, Miami University, Regionals (chair)
Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Gordon Fraser, University of Manchester
Mark Jerng, University of California, Davis
Claudia Stokes, Trinity University
2019 Winners
Graduate Students, Scholars in Contingent Positions, and Untenured Category
Winner: Gordon Fraser, “Distributed Agency: David Walker’s Appeal, Black Readership, and the Politics of Self-Deportation.” ESQ vol. 65, no. 2, 2019, pp. 221-256.
Tenured Category
Winner: Gregory Laski, “Reconstructing Revenge: Race and Justice after the Civil War.” American Literature vol. 91, no. 4, 2019.
2018 Winners
Graduate Students, Scholars in Contingent Positions, and Untenured Category
Winner: Christopher Pexa, “Futurity Foreclosed: Jonestown, Settler Colonialism, and the Ending of Time in Fred D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights.” MELUS 43.1 (Spring 2018): 2-20.
Tenured Category
Winner: Claudia Stokes, “Novel Commonplaces: Quotation, Epigraphs, and Literary Authority.” American Literary History 30.2 (2018): 201-221.
2017 Winners
Graduate Students, Scholars in Contingent Positions, and Untenured Category
Honorable mention: Hurley, Jessica. “Impossible Futures: Fictions of Risk in the Longue Dureé.” American Literature (89.4), 761-789.
Winner: Bronstein, Michaela. “The Princess among the Polemicists: Aesthetics and Protest at Midcentury,” American Literary History (29.1), 26-49.
Tenured Category
Winner: Burrows, Stuart, “Rethinking Regionalism: Sarah Orne Jewett’s Mental Landscapes,” J19 (5.2), 341-359.
2016 Winners
Tenured Category
Wilson, Sarah. “Black Folk by the Numbers: Quantification in Du Bois.” American Literary History 28:1 (2016), 27-45.
Untenured Category
Forbes, Erin. “Do Black Ghosts Matter? Harriet Jacobs’ Spiritualism.” ESQ 62:3 (2016).
American Literature Society 