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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Journal of Experimental Fiction announces 2022 Winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award Winner for the Innovative Novel!
AURORA, IL—August 31, 2022—The 2022 winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel is
Ann Z. Leventhal, of Bradenton, Florida, who spends her summer months in Manhattan, for her novel The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictmoir.
Ann Z. Leventhal is an accomplished writer. She's written a play, advertising copy, a political candidate's speeches and press releases. With a style and writing voice like no other, Leventhal brings much needed personality and gumption to the writing world and her readers. Never shy, her unique sense of humor is evident throughout her work and life.
JEF Books assistant editor Penelope Gerdes said the following in her encomium for the novel:
“When I sat to read The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictnoir, I wasn't certain what exactly I was looking for. Innovative work can quite often follow similar trends; oddly enough, they can be grouped in similarities by exactly how they innovate. Yet this work is inexhaustible. To understand its complexities, to see how well the writer understands the craft, how brilliantly she builds this space of language and structure, requires not just a dip but a dive, a delve. For one cannot reach the bottom. There is innovation from the first sentence to the last.”
Penelope Gerdes is an author and editor with a rich history of work in various settings, including publications in journals and professional editing in several business environments. She is a graduate of the writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently working on a revision of her previously published first novel.
The Makings of a Nobody: A Fictmoir was chosen as the winner of the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel over many other worthy candidates for the exceptional craft and originality with which it is written as well as for its deep sympathy for the human condition, both qualities epitomized by Kenneth Patchen himself.
After a hiatus, THE KENNETH PATCHEN AWARD was revived in 2012. In the 1990s, The Kenneth Patchen Prize for Literature was a much-coveted prize administered by Pig Iron Press of Youngstown, Ohio, in honor of famous experimental fiction author, proletarian poet, and Ohio native Kenneth Patchen. Beginning in 2012, the Award was reinstituted as the Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel, and it honors the most innovative novel submitted during the previous calendar year. KENNETH PATCHEN is celebrated for being among the greatest innovators of American fiction, incorporating strategies of concretism, asemic writing, digression, and verbal juxtaposition into his writing long before such strategies were popularized during the height of American postmodernist experimentation in the 1970s. His three great innovative novels, Sleepers Awake, The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer and The Journal of Albion Moonlight, have long been benchmarks for beats, postmodernists and innovators of all stripes, inspiring younger writers to greater significance and innovation in their own work.
ABOUT JEF: Founded in 1986, The Journal of Experimental Fiction is the English language’s pre-eminent source for innovative fiction. Contact: Eckhard Gerdes, editor & publisher, egerdes@experimentalfiction.com. Site: www.experimentalfiction.com
PREVIOUS WINNERS OF THE KENNETH PATCHEN AWARD FOR THE INNOVATIVE NOVEL
2021 – Dennis Vanderspek – A Is for Everyone
2020 – Cal Massey -- (Own Little Worlds)
2019 – Genelle Chaconas – Plague City
2018 – Patrick Keller – Those Brave As the Skate Is
2017 – Richard Strauss – The Skrat Prize Memorial Anthology
2016 – Charles Hood – Mouth
2015 – Kate Horsley – Between the Legs
2014 – Bob Sawatzki – Return to Circa ‘96
2013 – Moore Bowen – Oppression for the Heaven of It
2012 – Carolyn Chun – How to Break Article Noun