Writing Home

The James Duval Phelan and Joseph Henry Jackson awards, two of America's most distinguished and daring literary prizes, have long been administered by the San Francisco Foundation. Given to Western writers between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, many of the winners have gone on to notable writing careers and national prominence. Writing Home delivers some of the most vivid, playful, and provocative writings by previous award-winners. Fenton Johnson describes his first glimpse of California on a television screen in a Kentucky living room. James Houston lovingly traces the migrations of his ancestors from Buncombe County, North Carolina, over the Appalachian Mountains and eventually to the West Coast. Ernest Gaines tells of a young black man's return home to the Deep South after having lived in the Bay Area. Wendy Lesser, Frank Chin, James Broughton, Leonard Gardner, Jane Hirshfield, Philip Levine, and others add their own unique voices and perspectives. In this collection of memoir and personal essay, fiction, and poetry, a diverse group of award-winning and superbly skilled writers create a confederacy of voices. Sometimes they sing harmoniously, sometimes they argue with each other, but always, they return to the ambiguities and contradictions of living counter to and harmoniously with this mythic land.