All posts tagged: awards

The Common to Receive $15,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

Amherst, MA — The Common literary journal is pleased to announce its eighth award from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The Arts Projects grant approved for 2024 is The Common’s largest NEA award to date and will support the journal in publishing and promoting place-based writing, fostering international connections, and expanding the audiences of emerging writers.

National Endowment for the Arts' logo.

The Common to Receive $15,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
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“The Old Man of Kusumpur” Wins O. Henry Prize 2022

Cover of The Best Short Stories 2022: The O. Henry Prize Winners, edited by Valeria Luiselli. The text is in a white box in the upper left corner, and the rest shows a design of orange ovals on a purple backdrop

We are thrilled to announce that “The Old Man of Kusumpur,” written by Amar Mitra and translated from the Bengali by Anish Gupta, has been selected for the O. Henry Prize for 2022. The story was originally published in The Common Online. An anthology of the winning stories, edited by Valeria Luiselli, will be released this September from Anchor. 

This is the first year the O. Henry Prize series has considered fiction in translation. In the prize announcement, series editor Jenny Minton Quigley writes, “If stories give us a window through which to momentarily enter the soul of another person, then translated stories magically transcend the limits of the language that has shaped our consciousness.

View the full list of winners and read more about the prize at LitHub.

Congratulations to Amar, Anish, and all the winners!

“The Old Man of Kusumpur” Wins O. Henry Prize 2022
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“To Be Led from Behind” Chosen for 2020 Best Small Fictions Award Anthology

Mohammad Ibrahim Nawaya’s story “To Be Led from Behind,” translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger, has been chosen to appear in Sonder Press’s 2020 award anthology The Best Small Fictions. The anthology, now in its sixth year, presents one hundred and twenty-­six pristinely crafted pieces from an array of authors. It features micro fiction, flash fiction, haibun stories, and prose poetry.

The Bath Flash Fiction Award writes “[T]he beauty of an anthology such as this, pulling together the best of the form, is that you will always encounter something new, something different, something that pushes the boundaries of flash further than before. If this anthology proves nothing else, it is that small fiction in all its forms continues to go from strength to strength, as does the series itself.”

Congrats to Mohammad! Read “To Be Led from Behind” here, or check out other pieces from our Issue 17 portfolio of Arabic stories from Syria,.

Browse more of The Common’s prize-winning pieces here

“To Be Led from Behind” Chosen for 2020 Best Small Fictions Award Anthology
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“Coloso” Chosen for 2019 Best Small Fictions Award Anthology

Best Small Fictions cover

Hugo Ríos Cordero’s story “Coloso” has been chosen to appear in Sonder Press’s 2019 award anthology The Best Small Fictions. The anthology, now in its fifth year, presents one hundred and forty-­six pristinely crafted pieces from an array of authors representing twenty­-six nations and six continents. It features micro fiction, flash fiction, haibun stories and prose poetry. Kathy Fish, author of Wild Life: Collected Works says, “Brilliant, incendiary, incandescent, these tiny stories capture worlds both intimate and universal. Give this book to anyone who says flash fiction doesn’t go deep. This newest volume of Best Small Fictions demonstrates once and for all that flash fiction writers are the Ginger Rogers of the literary world, accomplishing all that novelists and short story writers do, only backwards and in high heels.”

Congrats to Hugo! Read “Coloso” here, or check out his other piece for The Common, “Tonight, the Wind,” from our Issue 16 portfolio of work about Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico.

Browse more of The Common’s prize-winning pieces here

“Coloso” Chosen for 2019 Best Small Fictions Award Anthology
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The Common Receives $10,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts

big NEA logo
The Common will receive its third grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2018. The Art Works grant of $10,000 will be awarded to The Common to help publish more and diverse writers, expand its readership, and also support The Common in the Classroom initiatives.

“We are thrilled to receive our third NEA grant as The Common heads into its 8th year of publication. The grant will go a long way to increase the diversity of authors and literary works published on our website and in print,” says Founder and Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker. “It will also support teachers and students who use The Common in the Classroom by expanding the library of online tools and resources.”

The Common Staff

The Common staff and interns. Left to right, standing Debbie Wen, Flavia Martinez, Managing Editor Emily Everett, Isabel Meyers. Seated Sunna Juhn, Editor in Chief Jennifer Acker, Madeline Ruoff. Not pictured: Julia Pike, Nayereh Doosti.

The Common Receives $10,000 Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts
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National Endowment for the Arts Awards $10,000 to The Common

Art Works logo arts.gov

Amherst, MA. Dec. 8, 2015—For the second year in a row, The Common literary magazine has been awarded an Art Works Grant of $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts. Based at Amherst College, The Common is one of 80 organizations across the country to receive an NEA Literature grant in 2015. The NEA funds will be matched by $20,000 from Amherst College and support:

  • A special issue of contemporary Arabic fiction, Tajdeed (Renewal), to be published in April 2016
  • The Common in the Classroom, an educational outreach program providing resources for educators to bring the magazine’s diverse, place-based literature into classrooms across the country
National Endowment for the Arts Awards $10,000 to The Common
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