2023 Recipient: Manuel Muñoz
Manuel Muñoz is the author of a novel, What You See in the Dark, and the short-story collections Zigzagger and The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, which was shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He has been recognized with a Whiting Writer’s Award, three O. Henry Awards, and an appearance in Best American Short Stories. His most recent book, The Consequences, was published by Graywolf Press in 2022. A native of Dinuba, California, he currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.
For any writer to reach midcareer is a kind of miracle and it is one that happens because of the engagement made possible by readers, librarians, booksellers, teachers, fellow writers, and everyone in the wide circle that is our literature. I am deeply grateful to receive the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and doubly so because I was eleven years between books and without a publisher for a time. My thanks to the many people, near and far, both friends and strangers, who kept encouraging me in my writing so that I could find myself here, stunned and yet elated by this recognition. Gracias to Stuart Bernstein, my literary agent, for his sustaining belief in my work and his persistence in seeing it to light. Gracias to my editor Ethan Nosowsky and everyone at Graywolf Press, who have worked so hard to get me in front of new audiences, and to Susie Nicklin and The Indigo Press in the UK, who so enthusiastically shared my stories. To the literary journals and the editors who have supported my work: my gratitude for your belief in my stories. Profound gracias to New Literary Project and its Board of Directors, the University of California, Berkeley, and their partners for their important work in promoting access and participation in our art for all communities. To Joyce Carol Oates, an everlasting gracias for lending her name and legacy to honor writers at such a crucial stage in our careers. I look forward to the autumn residency and working within the community being fostered by New Literary Project and, as a former high school teacher, send special congratulations to the newly named Jack Hazard Fellows. I am urged onward in my love of the short story and in my belief that it is an important mechanism in documenting my beloved Central Valley and insisting on its place in our national literature.
Manuel Muñoz
I was struck immediately by the beauty, poise & effortless empathy of The Consequences. The title was intriguing—eventually I saw the collection as a kind of novel in which “consequences” are explored. The moral intelligence of the author seemed to shine forth. The work is suffused with information, exposition very artfully blended in with the narration. The characters are utterly convincing, women as well as young men, most of them embarked upon quests of a kind, and the author holds up a mirror to his subjects, or rather a window of transparency. He is never intruding into the narrative as if out of respect for the humanity of his characters. Living far away on the East Coast, I am not much familiar with the world of Mexican-American farm workers & their families, but Manuel has made them feel like kin to me. I would place this deceptively modest collection of stories with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio as an example of how a novel might be created out of thematically linked stories that accumulate force and meaning. Much seemed to come together in the final story, “What Kind of Fool Am I?,” in which a young woman is at last freed of a familial burden; though, given the nuances of the situation, perhaps she will return to her consequential familial duty, as a caretaker of a difficult younger brother. As one who much appreciates the art of the short story, I was filled with admiration for a writer who creates an entire world within the space of a few pages, with seeming effortlessness.
Joyce Carol Oates
Once in an interview, Manuel Muñoz reflected movingly on a “deep love of literature and a belief that it is of use,” and how “that’s the transformative possibility.” He himself is an agent of imaginative transformation. He writes of transformational characters whose lives are altering before their eyes or being altered by forces out of their control, sometimes subtly, sometimes ineluctably, sometimes cruelly and mysteriously, but seemingly forever in the Central Valley of California. How enormous are the small towns he inhabits. He is also a valedictory writer, bidding farewell to people and to the past even while bravely facing the risks and riddling prospects on the horizon. His work plumbs depths a reader cannot resist exploring, sometimes at the expense of heartbreak, sometimes in thrall to wonder, and sometimes simultaneously in both. New Literary Project speaks of its purpose to nurture writers and writing across generations, communities, divides. Manuel Muñoz unforgettably brings that purposefulness to life in one beautiful story after another. We are indeed beyond fortunate to have him in our midst, believing that his writing is, to invoke his words, of profound transformational use to every one of us.
Joseph Di Prisco
Founding Chair, New Literary Project
It is both thrilling and gratifying to learn that Manuel Muñoz is the latest recipient of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for a mid-career writer. For years now, Muñoz’s exquisite stories have quietly been earning laurel after laurel—O. Henry Awards, appearances in Best American Short Stories—and The Consequences gathers many of his brilliantly constructed stories. Manuel is above all a gifted portraitist, and through his indelible characters he portrays class conflict, profound betrayals, the weight of family obligations, the brutality of the immigrant experience, and so much more. The stories in The Consequences are set in a particular place and time, but they speak powerfully about what it is to be human, what it is to love, to struggle, to exist in a family or a community. Thank you to the New Literary Project for their recognition of his important body of work.
Ethan Nosowsky
Editorial Director, Graywolf Press