Three authors with Arizona ties are among the finalists for the 2026 PEN America Literary Awards, one of the country’s most prestigious literary honors.
PEN America announced its finalists on Jan. 29 across 10 award categories, with nearly $350,000 in prizes to be given to writers and translators at a March 31 ceremony. Among them are a Tucson resident, a Phoenix-raised artist and a former Arizona Republic photographer — all recognized for works that push the boundaries of their genres.
Here’s a closer look at each finalist and their Arizona connections.
Acclaimed novelist and short story writer Joy Williams, who lives in Tucson and in Laramie, Wyoming, is a finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award for her latest work, “The Pelican Child.” It was also longlisted for the National Book Award. The Boston Globe said the book is “painterly and provocative, slipping beyond the frame of reality, as if Magritte or Dalí had propped their easels amid the Sonoran desert.”
Multimedia artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, who grew up in Phoenix after his family moved from Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, is a finalist in the same category for “SURVIVA: A Future Ancestral Field Guide,” a genre-bending work of Indigenous futurism that is part graphic novel and part art book. He’s now based in New Mexico, but he had a major collaborative installation at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum and has exhibited at the Museum of Northern Arizona.
Journalist Mary Annette Pember, who spent years as a photographer at The Arizona Republic and is now a national correspondent based in Cincinnati for ICT News, is a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award for “Medicine River,” her account of Native American boarding school trauma — a subject with deep resonance in a state that was home to institutions like the Phoenix Indian School.
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