She’s the toast of two continents!
A distinguished lecturer in Hunter College’s Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts Program was named the inaugural winner of a literary award named for a late author.
Ayana Mathis won the $10,000 Gabe Hudson Award for her novel The Unsettled (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023).
The award comes on the heels of Mathis’s selection as a Berlin Prize winner; she is spending the fall semester lecturing at the American Academy in Berlin.
The Gabe Hudson Award was established in Hudson’s memory by McSweeney’s magazine, where he worked as an editor. Hudson, who died last year at age 52, published two books and championed other writers.
The Unsettled also was a finalist for the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation’s 2024 Legacy Award for general fiction.
The Unsettled, Mathis’s second novel, follows three generations of a Black family as they confront tumultuous times and personal misfortunes in the 20th century North and South. Throughout the novel, Mathis “skillfully and subtly drops allusions to historical events, sending the reader on a kind of intellectual treasure hunt,” according to the New York Times.
It is no exaggeration to say that Mathis is the toast of the Times. Her first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), was a Times Bestseller, second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston–Wright Foundation’s Legacy Award. Mathis’s nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica, and Glamour. Her work has been supported by The New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was also a 2020–2021 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an assistant professor in the program.
