Ernest Hardy Wins the PEN/Beyond Margins Award

Critic Ernest Hardy has just won the PEN/Beyond Margins Award for his collection Bloodbeats: Vol. 1—Demos, Remixes & Extended Versions (Redbone Press). The Beyond Margins Award recognizes authors of color who have not received wide media coverage. Past winners include: Willie Perdomo, Victor LaValle, Raquel Cepeda, and Caryl Phillips.

Here's what I wrote about Bloodbeats a year ago:

[Hardy's] work resides at the obvious (to some) intersections of Blackness, gender and sexuality, but to simply align his writing and style to the now clichéd province of intersectionality is to miss the point of the work. This is writing that is doing real labor—heavy lifting, if you will—on behalf of those folks—the artists, the audiences, and the activists—who are grappling with “new language in the effort to overthrow…everything"... When all is said, Hardy is a critics’ critic—the kind of writer that demands that we all go back to the lab and press on.

Congratulations Ernest!