10 emerging writers receive $50,000 prizes

[October 22, 2013]  NEW YORK (AP) -- Ten emerging authors, poets and playwrights have been picked as winners of $50,000 prizes for showing "exceptional talent and promise."

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner hosted a ceremony in Manhattan on Monday for the Whiting Writers' Awards.

Recipients include fiction writers Hanna Dela Cruz Abrams and Amanda Coplin (COPE'-lin), poets Ishion (EYE'-shee-on) Hutchinson and Rowan Ricardo Phillips and playwright Virginia Grise (GRICE'). The other honorees are fiction writers Jennifer DuBois, C.E. Morgan and Stephanie Powell Watts, nonfiction writer Morgan Meis (MEESE') and nonfiction-fiction writer Clifford Thompson.

The Whiting prizes were established in 1985. Previous winners include Kushner, Jonathan Franzen and Mary Karr.

[Associated Press]

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