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The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards are given annually to six women writers who demonstrate excellence and promise in the early stages of their careers. The awards of $40,000 each will be presented to the six recipients on September 12 in New York City. Sarah, a freelance writer and editor who is currently pursuing an MFA at Bard, will use the grant to focus on her writing projects full time.

“Because the culture as a whole is so overwhelmingly commercial, it’s vital that professional, public, literary, and cultural criticism remain independent,” says Professor Mendelsohn. “Negative criticism is, in part, what fights against the commercial, or the merely stupid, or vulgar; it is a form of resistance, a reminder that we must think for ourselves and not have our judgments coopted by advertising and the ephemeral.”

“For Johns, factual certainties, such as the American flag or a plaster cast of a body part, enable him to dwell in ‘uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,’ and not reach after ‘fact,’ which would be redundant,” writes Yau in this two-part essay. “This is the pleasure that Johns gives us. He does not tell us what to see or think. He shows what seeing and thinking can be.”