Joseph Earl Thomas' (MFA '19) debut book, Sink: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing) is longlisted for the 2024 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. The award, which comes with a prize of $75,000, goes to a "book-length work of any genre for its originality, merit, and impact, which has broken new ground by reshaping the boundaries of its form and signaling strong potential for lasting influence."
Finalists for the awards will be announced before the 2024 Literary Awards Ceremony on April 29.
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He’s writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.