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About the Award
Professor John Barry was well known
in the community of Chicago authors writing in Spanish, and
since the early 1990s was dedicated to seeing that these Chicago
authors got the attention and encouragement they deserved.
He published many research papers calling attention to their
work, and in 1999 published Voces en el Viento:
Nuevas Ficciones desde Chicago, an anthology of 24
Chicago writers. In 2002 a paper of John's was presented
posthumously to the Midwest Modern Language Association, which
met here in Chicago, with the following abstract:
For more than a decade a group of Chicago writers has been
writing fiction, poetry and essays in Spanish, working in
relative obscurity but persevering and slowly growing in number.
They have published texts in literary and cultural magazines in
Chicago, Latin America and Spain and have produced several books
of short stories and poetry and even few novels, yet their work
is largely unknown, even within our city.
To continue John Barry's objectives of recognizing
excellence in the work of established Chicago authors writing in
Spanish, and to encourage activities from new 21st-century
writers in the significantly Latin-Americanized city of Chicago,
we created the
John Barry Award for New Fiction in Spanish.
For the first five years this prize was limited to contestants
writing in the Chicago area; this year it has been expanded to
allow contestants writing throughout the United States and
Canada.
Award Winners
Also see
Contest Rules and Story
Submission. |
