The Cleveland Arts Prize

Literature

The Cleveland Arts Prize in Literature has recognized a roster of gifted fiction and non-fiction writers, poets, and playwrights. Several have gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award, and, in one instance, the Nobel Prize. The honored works tell of the dreams that drew the immigrants to the shanty towns on the edge of Cleveland’s industrial valley; the boys from Newburgh Heights or Lorain sent off to the killing fields of Antietam and Long Bien, and the freed slaves who came north to discover a different (and not so different) America. Writing in styles that range from clear-eyed realism to poetic fantasy, these accomplished authors have found our present struggles foreshadowed in our past, our history illuminated in our imagined encounter with interplanetary cultures.