First of all, congratulations to our 2024 Michael Steinberg Prize winner, Chris Arthur, and to runners-up Nadia Choudhury and Adrian S. Potter. This year’s judge was the award-winning Rajiv Mohabir, Indo-Carribbean poet, essayist, memoirist, translator, and educator. https://www.rajivmohabir.com/
Of Arthur’s “Hototogisu Haunting.” Mohabir writes: “This essay is written in a beautiful synthesis of research, translation, poetry, and personal musings. Formally, it takes the question of haunting (a poetic haunting) and extends it through time and space. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I read it the first time, haunted by the deft parsing of meaning that Arthur performs for his readers, much in the vein of Robert Hass’s essay “Images”. Arthur extends beyond the formal consideration of the haiku and speaks of how relatable they are. He states, “[the haiku] speaks to a fundamental moment that every one of us will go through: the transition from conscious being to nonexistence.” For me, as a reader, my attention is ensnared by this treatise on an enduring form that stretches across countries, languages, and oceans.”
Of Nadia Choudhury’s “Mati’r Kela (orthoba, Dirt’s Play)” Mohabir writes that it “presents a history that is not often interrogated in the West. Using unconventional narrative structure, the essay lays bare an interiority that calls for the reader to listen up!; to learn more about the world around us that we think we know.”
Writing of Adrian S. Potter’s “How to Write a Political Poem During These Unprecedented Times,” Mohabir writes, “I love this essay-as-manifesto-as-confession as it blends the lived experience of a Black poet with the act of living through a hazardous country. Particularly interested in the interiority and the lyric moments of this essay—it works through accrual of the affective, which allows the “how to” to evade and the reader to question.”
Along with the other essays gathered here, we have as powerful an example of literary courage as we are likely to encounter anywhere. Allen Price (a previous Steinberg Prize winner) gives us an autobiographical examination of the nefarious and deep impact of racism, tracing, among all its other horrors, its power to undermine selfhood and health itself.
The courage to write, the trust in oneself that writing requires, should never be overlooked. Telling the truth is hard and dangerous work. In “My People,” Xinran Maria Xiang chooses that hard path: “I knew I would find entertainment on TV. When I showed up with only a pen, I might find something I didn’t like. I might find nothing.”
From the first line of Amy Hoffman’s (no relation) essay, “Israel was supposed to save us,” we are aware that we are hearing a disappointed voice, a disillusioned voice, an American Jewish voice that has come to a new understanding of history, one demythologized and more in tune with hard-won and longstanding Jewish values. I am once again struck by the bravery it takes to be honest: no mere virtue-signaling here, nothing but wrenching angst and grief, authentic and inescapable.
And so, we are proud to feature these magnificent examples of writerly courage, and I feel sure you will find inspiration and illumination reading them.
Richard Hoffman
Richard Hoffman is the author of nine books, including the memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury; the story collection Interference and other stories; the essay collection Remembering the Alchemists and other essays; and five books of poems: Without Paradise; Gold Star Road, which won the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award; Emblem; Noon until Night, winner of the 2018 Massachusetts Book Award for poetry; and People Once Real.
