Celebrating its 16th year, the Rona Jaffe Awards have helped many women build successful writing careers by offering encouragement and financial support at a critical time.
The awards of $25,000 each will be presented to the six recipients on Sept. 23 here in New York City.
Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams is working on a memoir, “The Following Sea,” which explores the lives of her parents, a father from the U.S. and a mother from the Northern Marianas, who raised her on a yacht in the South Pacific.
She says of the book project, “Even though it seemed we were as close as a family could be for ten years, their marriage fell apart and our lives went off in three different directions so that later, I would look back and find my own childhood recondite, shifting. When I started asking questions, I discovered how little I had really known my parents. After the split, my mother had returned to her home and my father had moved across several countries, married seven more times, and had a number of other children. As for myself, I never lived with my parents again after the age of twelve. The book is a way to recover our past and trace how the strange and fantastic lives that have happened since still connect us.”
Abrams lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and teaches at UNC Wilmington, where she received her B.A. and M.F.A.
She plans to use her writer’s award to lessen her workload and devote the next year to finishing her book.
Celebrated novelist Rona Jaffe (1931-2005) established The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Awards program in 1995.
It is the only national literary awards program of its kind dedicated to supporting women writers exclusively.
Since the program began, the foundation has awarded more than $1 million to emergent women writers, including several who have gone on to critical acclaim, such as Elif Batuman, Eula Biss, Judy Budnitz, Lan Samantha Chang, Rebecca Curtis, Rivka Galchen, Kathleen Graber, Frances Hwang, Aryn Kyle, ZZ Packer, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Szybist, and Julia Whitty.
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