Iromuanya's 'Mr. and Mrs. Doctor' makes PEN longlist

The first longlist for the 2016 PEN Literary Awards was published earlier today, announcing the nominees for the Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The Department of English wishes to congratulate Julie Iromuanya (Ph.D. 2010), whose novel Mr. and Mrs. Doctor is among those chosen. The PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction awards $25,000 to "an author whose debut work - a first novel or collection of short stories published in 2015 - represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise." This year's longlist consists of ten such novels, and a brief summary of each nomination can be found on the PEN American Center's website.

Julie Iromuanya received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska Lincoln in 2010. During her time at UNL, she was named a Presidential Fellow, won the Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award, and began work on Mr. and Mrs. Doctor as part of her dissertation (supervised by Jonis Agee). Her work has been featured in The Kenyon Review, Passages North, Cream City Review, and the Tampa Review, among others. She is currently Assistant Professor of English at the University of Arizona, where she teaches creative writing (fiction and pedagogy), African literature, African American literature, Caribbean literature, and multicultural literature. She is also hard at work on her second novel, A Season of Light.

Mr. and Mrs. Doctor, published in May 2015 by Coffee House Press, tells the story of Nigerian couple Ifi and Job, who begin their lives together in Nebraska following an arranged marriage. It is not long after her arrival in Nebraska that Ifi, the eponymous Mrs. Doctor, discovers the truth about her husband: he is not, in fact, a doctor.

You can learn more about Iromuanya and her work at julieiromuanya.com, and view the complete longlist for the 2016 PEN Literary Awards at PEN.org.