At the 2011 AWP Annual Conference and Bookfair, our association honored Askold Melnyczuk as this year’s recipient of the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature.

A much beloved teacher of writing and literature, Melnyczuk currently teaches in the Department of English at UMass Boston and in the Writing Seminars of Bennington College. He is the founding editor of Agni Magazine, which he established in 1972, and he is the founding publisher of Arrowsmith Press, which he established in 2005. He is the author of three novels and a novella, The House of Widows (2008), The Ambassador of the Dead (2001), What Is Told (1994), and Blind Angel (2004). He has also served as the translator or editor for many other works. He has served as chair of PEN New England’s Freedom to Write Committee. He has taught in prisons, and he helped to establish a writing project for “at-risk” youth.

In conferring the award, AWP’s Executive Director David Fenza said, “He has taught many, he has published many, and he has made our literary circles more thoughtful, more fruitful, and more generous. It’s the default position of writers and artists today to be rebels and iconoclasts—to disparage, dissent, disregard, dismantle, and disrespect; and these tactics have their utility. But William Butler Yeats said, ‘Talent perceives differences; genius, unity.’ Within the strife of our literary politics (and our national politics), we need leaders who seek affinities. We need those who aspire to that spirit of bridging and building. We need those who lead with whom and what they love. Askold Melnyczuk is one of those leaders.”

Every summer, AWP welcomes letters of nomination for future award recipients. Letters of nomination remain under consideration for three years. Please go to the George Garrett Award section of our website for more information and for Askold Melnyczuk’s acceptance speech.