Two Yaddo Writers Win Whiting Awards

Nami Mun Photo: Brigitte Sire

New York, NY (November 9, 2009) — Two Yaddo fiction writers – Nami Mun and Salvatore Scibona – are among the 10 recipients of the 2009 Whiting Writers' Awards, presented recently by the 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.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Mun grew up there and in the Bronx, New York. Her first book, Miles From Nowhere (Riverhead, 2009), tells the story of Joon, a 13-year-old Korean-American runaway living on the streets of 1980s New York, and was shortlisted for the Orange Award for New Writers in the UK. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Granta, The Iowa Review, Tin House, the 2007 Pushcart Prize anthology, and other journals. Mun, who has worked as a street vendor, an Avon representative, a photojournalist, a bartender, and a criminal defense investigator, graduated from UC Berkeley and has an MFA from the University of Michigan. She currently teaches creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago.

Salvatore Scibona Photo: Carlos Ferguson

Scibona's first book, The End, is a novel about a single day in 1953 as lived by six people in an Ohio carnival crowd. Published in 2008 by Graywolf Press, it was the winner of The New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Riverhead released a paperback edition of The End last month. Scibona's work has been published in The New York Times, The Threepenny Review, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. A graduate of the Great Books Program at St. John's College, where he earned his BA, he also has an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he administers the Writing Fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center.

Now in its 25rd year, the Whiting Writers' Awards program has honored 250 poets, fiction and nonfiction writers, and playwrights with grants totaling more than $6 million. Previous Yaddo winners of the award include Mona Simpson, Michael Cunningham, David Foster Wallace, Mark Doty, and Jeffrey Eugenides. For a complete list of Yaddo winners of the Whiting Awards, click here.