Houston native Sidik Fofana among 10 winners of $50,000 Whiting Award for emerging...
Houston native Sidik Fofana is the author of"Stories From the Tenants Downstairs," a collection that earned him a Whiting Award.Houston native Sidik Fofana was among the 10 recipients of the 2023 Whiting Awards, which for nearly 40 years have been given annually to emerging writers including Colson Whitehead, Ocean Vuong and Mary Karr. Fofana’s first book, “Stories From the Tenants Downstairs,” was published last year to wide acclaim.
The author unites the narratives in “Stories From the Tenants Downstairs” by casting them all with residents of Banneker Terrace, a Harlem high rise. With his emphasis on character, Fofana is able to address community concerns like gentrification by threading them naturally into the stories. “My hope was that I wasn’t making political statements about things like gentrification,” he says. “I think about a story like ‘Of Mice and Men.’ There’s a political explanation for it, two migrant workers during the Depression going from farm to farm seeking work. But the actual story is about two friends looking out for each other. It’s more about their friendship than about the Depression. That’s why we hold faith in stories. More for the human-to human tale than what it says about society.
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