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.
Current award details and submission information are at our Kenneth Patchen Award hub.l.
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 ilks, inspiring younger writers to greater significance and innovation in their own work.
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RED GIRL JUMPING is a fable-like memoir by Kim Merrill, a New York playwright. It is the story of Kimberly, a grown woman, and Red Girl, a shard of ...
The Makings of a Nobody is the novel that won Ann Z. Leventhal the 2022 Kenneth Patchen Award for the Innovative Novel. Leventhal calls the form a fictmoir, a memoir-fiction crossover, and the book...
