Tenorio Wins Prestigious Whiting Award

 

Lysley Tenorio

Saratoga Springs, NY (November 3, 2008) – Yaddo artist Lysley Tenorio is one of 10 recipients of the 2008 Whiting Writers' Awards, presented last week by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation to "emerging writers of exceptional talent and promise". The awards, which include a $50,000 cash prize, were announced at a ceremony at The Morgan Library and Museum in New York City.

Mr. Tenorio is a fiction writer who recently completed a collection of stories about the lives of first generation Filipino immigrants in California. Some of those stories have appeared in Ploughshares, the Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune, and Manoa. Two were anthologized in The Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices and another won a Nelson Algren Short Story Award. Born in the Philippines, Mr. Tenorio is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the MFA program at the University of Oregon. He has been a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford and a John Steinbeck fellow at San Jose State University.

A guest artist at Yaddo in 2001 and 2004, Mr. Tenorio currently reaches at Saint Mary's College in Moraga and lives in San Francisco, where he is working on a novel.

Now in its 24rd year, the Whiting Writers' Awards program has honored 240 poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights with grants totaling more than $6 million. In addition to Mr. Tenorio, the 2008 Whiting Writers' Awards winners are Mischa Berlinski, Rick Hilles, Donovan Hohn, Douglas Kearney, Laleh Khadivi, Manuel Munoz, Dael Orlandersmith, Benjamin Percy, and Julie Sheehan. For a list of all Yaddo winners of the Whiting Writers' Awards, please click here.