Sidik Fofana, a CUNY alumnus and adjunct faculty member whose first book of short stories, “Stories from the Tenants Downstairs,” was published to acclaim last summer, has been named a winner of the prestigious Whiting Award for emerging writers. The honor is given each year to 10 new literary voices by the Whiting Foundation and carries a $50,000 prize.
Fofana, 40, earned a masters degree in special education at The City College of New York in 2011 and is now an English teacher at the Brooklyn School for Math and Research, a New York City public high school in Bushwick. For the past nine years he has also taught in CUNY’s College Now program for high school students at the New York City College of Technology.
“Sidik Fofana personifies the guiding ethic of CUNY students and graduates – the combination of aspiration, talent, imagination, versatility and persistence that ultimately leads to success,” said Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “We congratulate Sidik on this exciting and well-deserved recognition from the Whiting Foundation. We are proud that he is not only a graduate of CUNY but also a role model and mentor for the next generation through his dedication to the CUNY College Now program.”
“Stories from the Tenants Downstairs” was years in the making and the culmination of a decade when Fofana published stories in literary magazines and honed his craft during a fellowship with Brooklyn’s venerable Center for Fiction.
“In a profession where you publish a story and you’re so happy to get $500 and then someone gives you this big award and tells you you’re getting $50,000 – it’s just, wow,” said Fofana. “It’s a stamp of approval.”
The short stories in the collection are written from the perspectives of eight residents of a Harlem building undergoing gentrification, each a distinct character who is struggling with life as eviction looms. The collection was widely praised when it was published last year by Scribner. In their award citation, the Whiting judges hailed Fofana as a writer who “hears voices with a reporter’s careful ear but records them with a fiction writer’s unguarded heart.”
Fofana’s early writing interest centered on hip-hop and it wasn’t until he was completing an English degree at Columbia University in 2005 that he began writing fiction. After earning his masters at City College, he completed the MFA writing program at NYU and had stories published in the Sewanee Review and Granta.
“I’ve always been fascinated with urban vernacular and voice, and writers like Alice Walker, Sapphire and Junot Diaz pushed me in that direction,” added Fofana. “I worked on the stories in the book on and off for 15 years and just kept going at it. ”
The Whiting Foundation has supported creative writing since 1985, recognizing emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and drama. Whiting winners have gone on to win prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Obie Award and MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships.
Whiting Award winners who have been recognized with prestigious literary awards and honors in the past several years include National Book Award winner and MacArthur Fellow Don Mee Choi (poetry); National Book Award winner John Keene (fiction, poetry); Pulitzer Prize winners Colson Whitehead (fiction), Anne Boyer (poetry, nonfiction), Jericho Brown (poetry), Mitchell S. Jackson (fiction), Michael R. Jackson (drama), and James Ijames (drama); PEN/Jean Stein Book Award winners Yiyun Li (fiction) and Layli Long Soldier (poetry), who also won a National Book Critics Circle Award; National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and winner of the Story Prize Ling Ma (fiction); PEN/Voelcker Award Finalist and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award winner Roger Reeves (poetry); and MacArthur Fellows Daniel Alarcón (fiction) and Ocean Vuong (poetry), who is an alumnus of Brooklyn College.
Whiting Award winners who have received significant critical acclaim for recent or upcoming works include Hernan Diaz (fiction) for “Trust,” Yiyun Li (fiction) for “The Book of Goose,” Colson Whitehead (fiction) for “Harlem Shuffle,” Jen Beagin (fiction) for “Big Swiss,” Tracy K. Smith (poetry) for “There’s A Revolution Outside, My Love,” Catherine Lacey (fiction) for “The Biography of X,” Jaquira Díaz (nonfiction) for “Ordinary Girls,” Elif Batuman (nonfiction) for “Either/Or,” Jia Tolentino (nonfiction) for “Trick Mirror,” Esmé Weijun Wang (nonfiction) for “The Collected Schizophrenias,” Ling Ma (fiction) for “Bliss Montage,” and Roger Reeves (poetry) for “Best Barbarian.”
The list of other Whiting Award recipients since 1985 includes then-emerging luminaries Sigrid Nunez (who is on the faculty at Hunter College), Mary Karr, Tony Kushner, Susan-Lori Parks, David Foster Wallace, Danai Gurira, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeffrey Eugenides, Lydia Davis, Alexander Chee, Lucy Grealy, August Wilson, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Alice McDermott, Danzy Senna, Victor Lavalle, Tyehimba Jess, ZZ Packer, Suketu Mehta, Cristina García, Denis Johnson, Darryl Pinckney, Jorie Graham, Ben Fountain, Terrance Hayes, Sarah Ruhl, Jo Ann Beard, Lucas Hnath, Linda Gregg, Nami Mun, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and Adam Johnson, among others.
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