In recognition of the work scholars are doing to advance the field of Beat Studies, the BSA’s board of directors is proud to announce the winners of the first annual Beat Studies Association Awards for Best Book, Best Professional Article, and Best Graduate Student Paper.
Stevan M. Weine’s Best Minds: How Allen Ginsberg Made Revolutionary Poetry from Madness (Fordham UP, 2023) received the BSA Award for Best Book. In Best Minds, Weine—a psychiatrist, researcher, and scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine—offers a captivating glimpse into how Allen Ginsberg turned experiences of mental illness into powerful, widely read poems of the twentieth century.
Earning recognition as the runner-up for Best Book is Polina Mackay ( independent academic author) for Beat Feminisms: Aesthetics, Literature, Gender, Activism (Routledge, 2022). This book, a comprehensive study of women writers of the Beat Generation, explores the evolving feminism of Diane Di Prima, ruth weiss, and Anne Waldman. Analyzing experimental and multimedia artists such as Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker, Mackay contends that these writers’ feminist perspectives developed over time while emphasizing intertextuality, transformation, and activist poetics.
Annie de Saussure (National Cathedral School) won the award for Best Professional Article for “Ancestral Uprooting and Literary Homecomings: Kerouac’s ‘Return’ to Brittany.” Published in the Journal of Beat Studies 11, de Saussure’s study examines Kerouac’s published and unpublished writings—including his novels, manuscripts, typescripts, journals, and diaries—to shed light on the symbolic significance that Brittany held in his work.
In the category of Best Graduate Student Paper, Elisa Sabbadin (University College Cork) won for “‘The American Non-Dream’: Addiction and the Grotesque Body in William S. Burroughs’ Works,” published in JAm It!: Journal of American Studies in Italy #8 (2023). In this work, Sabbadin explores addiction and the grotesque body through Burroughs’ use of these tropes as symbols of social control and subversion. Sabbadin contends that by employing dynamics and imagery associated with invasion, predation, and control, Burroughs crafts a literature of resistance set against the social, political, and economic backdrop of post-war America.
The winners were chosen from works published between 2021 and 2023. All winners receive a certificate, a cash award of between $50 and $100, and dues-free membership for the following year. The Awards Committee comprised Matt Theado, Hassan Melehy, Kurt Hemmer, Steve Belletto, Debby Geis, Mary Paniccia Carden, Brett Sigurdson, and Lisa Hollenbach.
The deadline for the second annual BSA Awards, given to work published in 2024, will be announced later this year. The Awards Committee will again include BSA members; if you would like to serve on the Awards Committee, please let us know by sending an email to Matt Theado at mtheado@outlook.com