The MMLA Book Award

The MMLA would like to congratulate the 2024 Book Award winners, Jennifer Chukwu and Amina Gautier. 

The MMLA's Executive Committee stated "The Unfortunates is at times witty, at times laugh-out-loud funny, always heartfelt and courageous—a novel that anyone in academia should read" and "The Best That You Can Do perfectly matches form and voice to offer a genuinely original contribution to diasporic literature." 

Chukwu's The Unfortunates is an edgy, bitingly funny debut about a queer, half-Nigerian college sophomore who, enraged and exhausted by the racism at her elite college, is determined to reveal the truth about The Unfortunates—the unlucky subset of Black undergrads who Just. Keep. Disappearing.

Gautier's The Best That You Can Do is primarily told from the perspective of women and children in the Northeast who are tethered to fathers and families in Puerto Rico. These stories explore the cultural confusion of being one person in two places—of having a mother who wants your father and his language to stay on his island but sends you there because you need to know your family. Loudly and joyfully filled with Cousins, Aunts, Grandparents, and budding romances, these stories are saturated in summer nostalgia, and place readers at the center of the table to enjoy family traditions and holidays: the resplendent and universal language of survival for displaced or broken families.

Jennifer Chukwu currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Chicago. She holds a MFA from Brown University and was a 2019 Lambda Fellow. Her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, and TAYO. She's been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and was short-listed for the 2020 Tarpaulin Sky Book Award. Her writing centers on generational and racial trauma, toxicity in gender dynamics, performance, and mental health. She's presented work at University of Wisconsin-Madison, UC Berkeley, National Louis University, The University of Manchester, and elsewhere.

Professor Gautier has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Marquette University, Saint Joseph’s University,  Washington University in St. Louis,  DePaul University. She is currently faculty in the MFA program at the University of Miami. Gautier is a member of AWP, Chicago Writer’s Association, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc., Friends of American Writers Chicago, MidWest MLA, Modern Language Association, National Association of University Women (NAUW), National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), National Urban League, Nineteenth Century Studies Association, and Society of Midland Authors. Amina Gautier is a Brooklyn-born native New Yorker who currently divides her time between Chicago and Miami.