Danielle Evans, Meg Eden awarded 2021 TU Prize for Literature

By Rebecca Kirkman on June 8, 2021

This year’s Towson University Prize for Literature has been awarded to two Maryland writers—Danielle Evans for the collection of short stories “The Office of Historical Corrections” and
Meg Eden for the poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World.”

Evans, who is a 2021 winner of The New Literary Project Joyce Carol Oates Prize and a 2020 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, brings her insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology and American history through a novella and a collection of short stories published by Riverhead Books (2020).

Described by The New Yorker as “sublime short stories of race and belonging,” the collection of fiction was named one of the best books of 2020 by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, Buzzfeed, Slate, Glamour and O Magazine.

In the titular novella, a Black scholar from Washington, D.C., is drawn into a complex historical mystery that spans generations and puts her job, love life and oldest friendship at risk, while in “Boys Go to Jupiter,” a white college student tries to reinvent herself after a photo of her in a Confederate-flag bikini goes viral.

As a mid-Atlantic native and current Maryland resident, Evans says winning the 2021 Towson University Prize for Literature feels especially poignant.

“It means a lot to me to know that people have read my work carefully and seriously and found it worthy of this honor,” she says. “As someone who grew up in the mid-Atlantic, returned home a few years ago and is living in the Maryland part of this region for the first time and working on a novel partially set in Maryland, it also feels especially meaningful and like being claimed or welcomed home, to win a prize that’s specifically for a Maryland writer.”

Eden, who considers Japan her second home, says “Drowning in the Floating World” (Press 53, 2020) was inspired by the Japanese natural disaster known as 3/11—the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Eden incorporates Japanese phrases and characters throughout her poems. She explains it as a sort of natural extension of the code-switching, or alternating between languages, that happens in spoken conversation among the bilingual.

“Code-switching is a natural part of speech, so it only makes sense to me for it to happen on the page,” she says in an interview with the blog Poetry Matters. “Some things just can’t be translated—and they shouldn’t have to be. Something is always lost in translation. As I wrote, I used the words that came to me, the ones that made the most sense.”

The collection, which follows Eden’s 2017 novel “Post-High School Reality Quest,” was described by National Poetry Series winner Christopher Kondrich as “a haunting collection imbued with profound empathy.”

“I hope readers will be challenged to not move along with the news cycle but to remember tragedy and teach the next generation about history and the lessons it’s taught us,” Eden says. “I also hope readers will reflect for themselves: What brings you lasting hope and joy? How do we cope with and recover from disaster?”

Established in 1979 with a grant from Alice and Franklin Cooley, the Towson University Prize for Literature is awarded annually for a book or book-length manuscript of fiction, poetry, drama or imaginative nonfiction by a Maryland writer. The prize is granted on the basis of literary and aesthetic excellence as determined by a panel of distinguished judges appointed by the university.