Lori Jakiela, a Trafford-based writer, is a poet and memoirist who can now put “award winning” in front of her name, with a nice prize to go with it.
On Monday, City of Asylum, a North Side-based nonprofit that supports writers persecuted in their native countries, announced that Ms. Jakiela was the 2015 winner of tn the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh Prize — with a one-month, all-expenses-paid writing residency in Belgium.
She’s won a few small prizes before, “but nothing like this. This is huge,” said the 50-year-old mother of two who teaches writing at University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg. Ms. Jakiela’s husband, Dave Newman, is also a writer who has won acclaim for his novels and poetry.
Ms. Jakiela was chosen from a pool of writers who, according to the prize guidelines, must be over 30, residents of Western Pennsylvania and have published at least one full-length book of poetry, fiction or nonfiction. Previous prize winners include Terrance Hayes (2011) and Roman Antopolsky (2013).
This year’s judge was Chuck Kinder, the celebrated author of “Snakehunters and Honeymooners: A Cautionary Tale,” also a longtime University of Pittsburgh writing professor and literary mentor to generations of writers, including former student Michael Chabon.
“While I found many pleasures in quite a few of the entries, I kept returning with delight and excitement to the writing sample in Lori Jakiela's application,” Mr. Kinder said in a statement.
The prizes are part of City of Asylum’s Bridges initiative, which seeks to create a number of international writer residencies for writers from Western Pennsylvania. This one is at Passa Porta literary center in Brussels and is in collaboration with a Belgian literary organization, Het beschrijf.
Henry Reese, president and co-founder of City of Asylum, said there were many impressive entries. Ms. Jakiela’s “dedication to her craft means that she will be able to use her residency in Belgium to her artistic advantage, but I also feel that she reflects well on the literary community of our city and represents the values of City of Asylum in a special way.”
Ms. Jakiela is a former flight attendant for Delta and, before that, reporter for the Erie Daily Times. She teaches writing at University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg and Chatham University, and is a co-director of Chautauqua Institution’s Summer Literary Festival.
Her memoirs — she’s about to publish her third and last one this spring, she says — grew out of her poems.
“I found the lines becoming really long and not behaving,” Ms. Jakiela said, and eventually, her writing “became a hybrid between poetry and memoir.” In its own way, nonfiction “helps me figure out things in life that don’t make any sense.”
Her last book, “The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious,” was “painfully funny,” said Post-Gazette book editor Tony Norman in a 2013 review. In fact, he added, it is “so good you’ll wonder why the author isn’t the literary toast of the entire country by now.”
Besides “The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious” (C&R Press), Ms. Jakiela is the author of the memoir “Miss New York Has Everything” (Hatchette), as well as the poetry collection “Spot the Terrorist” (Turning Point). Her limited-edition poetry chapbooks include “The Regulars” (Liquid Paper Press / winner of The Nerve Cowboy Chapbook competition); “The Mill Hunk's Daughter Meets the Queen of Sky” (Finishing Line); and “Red Eye” (Pudding House).
Her third memoir— “Belief Is its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe” — is forthcoming from Atticus Books in 2015.
Mackenzie Carpenter, mcarpenter@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1949 or on Twitter @MackenziePG.
First Published: January 20, 2015, 5:00 a.m.