The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Philosophical Literature Prize

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award

Inspired by great Black music and visual art, Monifa Love seeks, in her words, “to record our daily and centuries-old contests to live as free persons on this earth.”

Monifa Love is Professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies and Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Bowie State University. She was a 2023 Board of Regents Faculty Awards recipient for Outstanding Creative Activity and a 2021 recipient of the President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Love earned her doctorate in English from Florida State University and studied as a McKnight Doctoral Fellow and as an associate of the great philosopher and oppression theorist William R. Jones. She earned her bachelor's degree in Anthropology with honors from Princeton University.

Love is the author of two poetry collections, Provisions and Dreaming Underground (2003), which won the Naomi Long Madgett Award. She co-authored two fine arts catalogs about the life and work of the artist Ed Love. She produced “….my magic pours secret libations,” a fine arts catalog and video of an exhibition she curated of African American and Afro-Cuban women artists. Love is the co-author of Romancing Harlem, a cultural memoir of Harlem written with Charles Norman Mills. Additionally, Love co-authored “Deep-Rooted Cane: Consanguinity, Writing, and Genre” with writer Evans D. Hopkins, who is the inspiration for the character of David Carmichael in Love's award-winning novel Freedom in the Dismal (1998). She founded Home Base Women, a women's poetry chorus. Her work can be found in numerous reference books, textbooks, and journals. She co-edited and wrote the introduction to Speculations on Black Life: The Collected Essays of William R. Jones (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Love has participated in two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships: African Cinema (Dakar, Senegal, 2005) and Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement (University of Kansas, 2015). Recently, her poem “Abraham Lincoln Turns to Listen to the Lower Ninth” was featured on Poem-A-Day. She lives in Maryland with her spouse, and they work on development projects in Ghana. 

On Love’s selection, President Martinez states:

Monifa Love’s life and work brings us into contact with the consequential nuance of life struggles in ways that are only possible with the highest levels of artistic expression. Deeply relevant for present struggles, Love’s poetry moves with incisive reverence for our collective histories.

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Lifetime Achievement Award

Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, and grew up, from age four, in California. He received a B.A. from Princeton University in 1969 and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1975. He is the author of twelve chapbooks of poetry, Birds Anonymous (Verge Books, 2023) the most recent; six books of poetry, Blue Fasa (New Directions, 2015) the most recent; a boxed set comprised of three double books of poetry, Double Trio: Tej Bet, So’s Notice, Nerve Church (New Directions, 2021); and a five-volume prose/fiction work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, the last volume of which is Late Arcade (New Directions, 2017). He is also the author of two books of criticism, Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2018) the most recent. Strick: Song of the Andoumboulou 16–25, a compact disc recording of poems read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine Company; Stray: A Graphic Tone, a vinyl LP of poetry and commentary, was released by Fonograf Editions/ROMA Publications in 2019; Fugitive Equation, a double-CD collaborative performance with The Creaking Breeze Ensemble, was released by Creaking Breeze in 2019. He is the editor of the literary magazine Hambone, a co-editor, with Art Lange, of the anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press, 1993), and a coeditor, with Michael Bough, Kent Johnson and others, of the anthology Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Dispatches Editions/Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017). His honors include the National Book Award for poetry, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from the Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Poetry Prize from the Library of Congress, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, and teaches at Duke University, where he is the Reynolds Price Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1974–1976), the University of Southern California (1976–1979), and the University of California, Santa Cruz (1979–2010).

Jeremy Matthew Glick, whose The Black Radical Tragic (NYU Press, 2016) was a Guillén Outstanding Book of 2017, which earned him a Laureate member’s place on the Awards Committee, sent a letter to the Executive Board upon learning of Professor Mackey’s selection. Here, with his permission, is an excerpt:

…in all Mackey revolutionizes the poetic-epistolary form with Henry Dumas-esque insurgent force.

Jean Genet famously wrote that George Jackson gave life to an epistolary form that languished since its eighteenth-century heyday (representative in the work of the likes of Samuel Richardson and its afterlives—such as the nineteenth century “epistolary activism” of Harriet Jacobs). Genet transitioned in 1986 the year of Bedouin’s publication and would have most certainly extended his timeline if given the chance to read Mackey’s work. And if all that wasn’t enough to merit recognition for lifetime achievement—Mackey’s recording with Taj Mahal “slaps” as the kids these days say.

Nathaniel Mackey in his person as scholar, poet, performer, educator should be honored and honored again and again and again. He is like Bradbury’s iconic figure of men and women as memory-fonts committed to preserving a single book; yet Mackey’s embodied scale is the entire library! He’s such a brilliant and decent human. His example is an important bulwark against revanchist, retrograde times.

President Martinez agrees:

Nathaniel Mackey’s life and work carries enormous relevance toward understanding the power and significance of artistic expression in the ongoing development of culture. Mackey’s work shows us how the musicality of Jazz infuses linguistic expression with the vitality of cultural rebirthing beyond the static repetition of a dehumanizing culture. Mackey’s work moves beyond art and expression as things to be seen and directs us toward the living and breathing sources of humanity.

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award

Skinny Poem

Richard Jones, Skinny Poem. Politics & Prose, 2023.

Richard A. Jones is a social and political philosopher and postmodern poet. A life-long educator, Jones taught philosophy for ten years at Howard University in Washington, D.C., after earning his Ph.D. in philosophy in 2000 from the University of Colorado. As the elected Co-Coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association, he organized an international conference on “Transnational Capitalism” in Cape Town, South Africa in 2009. Jones’s philosophical writings provide frameworks for addressing deep metaphysical questions with practical political and moral implications. His scholarship is marked by its meticulous exegetical work and original, provocative arguments. His papers have appeared in Teaching Philosophy, The Journal of Black Studies, Socialism and Democracy, and Radical Philosophy Review. In The Black Book: Wittgenstein and Race (Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), he examines Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work through the lens of African American and Africana philosophy in arguing its contemporary relevance for Black people. Jones’s next philosophical work, Postmodern Racial Dialectics: Philosophy Beyond the Pale (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), is a collection of ten essays addressing a wide range of issues beyond the bounds of traditional racial discourse. The essays are dialectical in the sense that they are conversations between personal histories, between ideologies, and between the changes in racial discourse ethics after Barack Obama’s election. A prolific writer and poet, Jones has published ten poetry collections and two novels during the past twenty years. His poetry in volumes like Bippie Poems (Publishamerica, 2004), and Iowa Poems (Beckham Publications, 2008), and Skinny Poem continue his irreverent, postmodern, ludic playfulness with language against a backdrop of dead earnestness about the racial and existential struggles of the twenty-first century. Scientific American magazine featured his poem “String Theory” in 2021. Jones’s Memoirs of a Black Philosopher (Hamilton Books, 2024) is forthcoming. He is privileged to have his lifetime works included in the Archives of Africana Philosophy recently established by Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr., at Haverford College.

In 1965, Cornell University Press published A. R. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year. Inspired by Ammons’s great wit and lean methodology—short lines constrained by the width of the adding machine tape—Richard A. Jones has written a poem on a continuous 160-foot roll of adding machine tape. He used a fifty-year-old manual typewriter (Hermes 3000) to type the poem. Written over a span of eight months in 2019–2020, this continuous poem is a chronicle—COVID-19, George Floyd, social protests and his own struggles with ageing, books he’d read, and his ongoing philosophical problems. The ludic motivations for Skinny Poem—beyond the obvious homage to Ammons—is to prevent a roll of paper from being used commercially in a gasoline pump.

As one evaluator reports:

As one would imagine, I was intrigued. I wasn’t disappointed. This “skinny poem” is epic! It rolls along 258 pages in a transition from what for so many was another world, as time itself—or perhaps, properly, durée has changed on a global scale. No one could have portended the tumult as of the writing of this review, but the depth, tenderness, breadth, philosophical acuity, wit, care, pathos, anger, joy, loss chronicled in this work—harkening not only Proust and Dostoevsky but also Neruda, Giovanni and other voices from “below”—I found my myself returning to the author’s journey, as if on a long walk, into that profound experience of a mind rhythmically attuned to matters of the heart….

….From existentialism to Africana philosophy to contemporary critical reflections on blackness and “Black death,” this poetic meditation is nothing short of a tour de force. A triumph! It’s worthy of this award, as I imagine it evokes Langston in conversation with Guillén through this African American philosopher-poet. I strongly recommend awarding this unusual work, which rises to the occasion of its namesake.

President Martinez adds:

Richard A. Jones’ Skinny Poem is a remarkable achievement that offers us a living through of time confronted with the full range of collectively shared and privately lived experiences. From COVID-19 to the massive movements of social consciousness following the murder of George Floyd, Jones offers us a deeply human presence whose poetic reach elevates humanity itself.

The Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award

Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming

Jaspal Kaur Singh, Exiles and Pleasures: Taunggyi Dreaming. Finishing Line Press, 2023.

Born and raised in Burma, Jaspal Kaur Singh has lived in India, Iraq, South Africa, and Turkey. She is Professor Emerita of the English Department and Gender Studies at Northern Michigan University. She currently teaches courses in English Literature and Writing at Oregon State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon in 1998, a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry and Hybrid Writing from Northern Michigan University in 2022, and a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (English Literature, Composition, and Gender Studies) from Oregon State University in 1992. Additionally, she holds an M.A. degree in English Literature from Agra University, India (1976), and a B.S.C. from the University of Delhi, India (1974). Her other books include Red Henna Blues (Creative non-fiction, Finishing Line Press, ); Sikh Gender and Sexual Identity: Construction of Gender and Queer Sexuality in Indian and Diaspora Writing (book, co-author, Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2026); Violence and Resistance in Sikh Gendered Identity (Routledge, 2020); Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas, Postcolonial Studies (Peter Lang, 2009) Narrating the New Nation: Writings from South African Indians (anthology, co-author, Peter Lang, 2018); Negotiating Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Turkey (anthology, co-editor, Peter Lang, 2016); Representation and Resistance: Indian and African Women Writers at Home and in the Diaspora (monograph, University of Calgary Press, 2008); Trauma, Resistance, Reconciliation in Post-1994 South African Writing (anthology, co-editor, Peter Lang, 2010); and Voice On the Water: Great Lakes Native America Now (anthology, assistant-editor, Northern Michigan University Press, 2011).

Exiles and Pleasures, reflecting themes of trauma, memory, psychic fragmentation and survival, echoes the poet’s own multiple migrations as a member of the Sikh diaspora-from the mountains of the Shan States in Taunggyi, Burma, to the subtropical and semi-arid capital of India, New Delhi, to the hot deserts of Baghdad, Iraq, and eventually to the cold shores of Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in the United States of America. The poetry, inspired by Singh's exile from her birth country, Burma, after the military coup of 1962, to her resettlement as a stateless citizen in her ancestral home in India during her teen years and eventually, her arrival in her thirties to the U.S. as a resident alien, is fueled and driven by ancestral female voices-grandmothers and mother-and especially by the poet's own hybrid ethos through woman-centric poetics. It is the community of women, in domestic and public spaces of the home and the world, in India/Burma and in the Indian diaspora, particularly the Sikh, that defines Singh's singularly creative style. She, too, like many diasporic writers, uses hybridity to create an aesthetic that, although not unique in terms of postcolonialism, is particularly hers in that, as a tricultural transplant, her writing vividly reveals the pluralistic ethos of an exile and a diasporic. Like George Lamming (life-time achievement winner of the Guillén Award, Singh highlights not only about the trauma of dislocation, but also about the “pleasures of exile” through her splintered poetics.

From one of the evaluators’ reports:

This gorgeous, poignant, profound, reflective, and sensuous book evokes the complexities of agency in the midst of colonial imposition, familial bonds, hunger, and struggles of dignity. The role of food, of the aesthetic dimensions of nourishment, in which ginger, mangoes, teas, alongside spices, offer connection despite exile without collapsing into nostalgia but affirmations of life. Matthew Gavin Frank’s review of the book is wonderfully on point: “In Singh’s careful hands, the erased names of the dead can again be conjured and therefore remembered in the juice of a broken mango, the ferment of tea leaves, the sliver of ginger that hisses as it fries. This is a book—yes—about exile and estrangement, but also about the ferocity and persistence of joy, and about how a willingness to engage the pleasures of the flesh in the aftermath of the atrocities perpetuated thereon can be not only an act of rebellion, but [also] an act of re-dedication. This is a beautiful and essential book.” I agree. It’s worthy of the namesake of this book award.

Adds President Martinez:

Jaspal Kaur Singh’s Exiles and Pleasures compromises neither trauma nor sensuality in a complex admixture of poetry and prose that is both historical unearthing and incisive critique of colonialism and its legacies. The work takes the reader far beyond the limits of colonizer-colonized dualities to grapple with complexities of displacement and placement as markers of the human struggle to find beauty and love.

Nicolás Guillén Philosophical Literature Prize Previous Recipients