Olivia Cyrus, Contributing Photographer

Few literature festivals would have a Division I basketball coach interview a New York Times-bestselling author. 

Even fewer would have a poet do a reading alongside an improvising saxophonist.

When writer Donald Windham died in 2010, he asked his estate to be used in the creation of the now prestigious Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes. He left room for creativity. 

“He didn’t ask us to pick a certain kind of writing,” said Michael Kelleher, director of the Windham Campbell Literature Prizes and Literary Festival at Yale University. “He just asked us to recognize writers we thought deserved a wider audience and to give them time to write. That’s really it.”

With this creativity and Yale’s financial resources, the Windham Campbell prizes have become one of the most generous prizes in literature in the world, an astonishing feat considering it was started only 12 years ago. The prize awards each writer with a monetary sum of $175,000. 

The three-day long festival includes events such as readings from winners, a keynote address from acclaimed writer and translator Lydia Davis, as well as community writing workshops. 

The festival awards outstanding literature coming from the English-speaking world. This year, the winners of the prize are Christina Sharpe for nonfiction, Christopher Chen for drama, Deirdre Madden for fiction, Hanif Abdurraqib for nonfiction, Sonya Kelly for drama, Jen Hadfield for poetry, Kathryn Scanlan for fiction and m. nourbeSe philip for poetry. 

In contrast with other international festivals recognizing talent in writing, the festival centers around the writers themselves, as opposed to promoting an individual book.

“The prizes are global in scope, and I think that becomes clear in that the writers get selected, and that becomes the basis for our festival,” Kelleher says. “And it varies year to year because we have different writers every year and they all have different interests.”

When the Windham Campbell prize began recognizing writers, there was an agreement between Yale and the estates left by Donald Windham and his partner Sandy M. Campbell that recipients would accept the prize in person and there would be a celebration comprised of interactive literary events.

The festival has become a community-based event aspiring to accumulate an audience of international literature fans, curious college students and families seeking entertainment in the New Haven area alike.

Flematu Fofana ’28 got the opportunity to indulge in the festival’s second day of programming by watching Davis’ prize ceremony and keynote lecture.

“I think that it was very heartwarming,” said Fofana. “I could tell [the writers] have poured a lot of effort into their careers and to be able to receive an award of this magnitude was probably very emotional for them and it made me emotional watching it.”

Kelleher described the festival as a “very different kind of festival” due to its small size, local feel and lack of an attendance fee. With no singular vision, Kelleher and his staff have tried to curate events around each writer’s individual strengths and desires. 

It is displays like this that excite Kelleher and intrigue attendees, Kelleher said. 

For instance, Hanif Abdurraqib’s work, “There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension,” relates to themes of basketball and American myths of success. Kelleher aimed to create an event that catered specifically towards Abdurraqib’s book by having the Yale men’s basketball head coach, James Jones, interview him.

m. nourbeSe philip, one of the winners at this year’s festival, who enjoys performing with musicians, is set to perform with a saxophonist from the Yale School of Music. 

philip, in particular, says that she was pleasantly surprised upon finding out that she was one of this year’s winners. 

“It just came out of the blue!” philip said. “I had no idea I was in the running for it. But it’s an honor to be in the company of other wonderful writers.” 

philip has a degree in law from the University of Western Ontario and practiced law for seven years before deciding to write poetry professionally. 

This year marks the 15th anniversary of her book-length poem titled “Zong!,” which tells the story of the victims of the Zong Massacre, where enslaved Africans were murdered by the crew of the British slave ship Zong. The piece challenges traditional narrative structures and pushes boundaries in form and content to navigate historical record and creative word.

“In ‘Zong!,’ the form tries to replicate the drowning of the enslaved Africans,” philip says. “So the words are positioned in such a way that they stand in for those Africans who weren’t able to breathe, and the words begin to breathe for them.”

As a female Tobagonian writer, philip says she hopes that “Zong!” and her other works empower and affirm people’s individual unique traits, characteristics and backgrounds.

“What my writing intends to do is to say that we are endowed and blessed with beautiful forms,” philip says. “Both in our material body and also in terms of our culture, our ways of being, our ways of loving, and our ways of living. So much in life attempts to say that to be sufficient is to be ‘X, Y and Z.’ I feel that ‘being’ ought to be sufficient.”

Kelleher says that in working with artists such as philip, he is constantly trying to remain current in the ever-changing world of literature. He notes that every genre of the art form has its own “center of gravity,” with the two largest ones in the English-speaking world being New York and London. 

With the annual festivities, he tries to “expand outward from [these] centers of gravity” to put together a festival that is representative of the world’s unique talents and their backgrounds. 

“I think it’s about planting seeds. I’ve been doing this for 12 years now. We’ve had people that range from completely obscure writers to very well-known writers,” Kelleher says. “And I think the literary landscape has changed quite a lot. I don’t think it really makes changes on a vast scale at the moment. It plants seeds that make change over time. I feel like that is what we offer, I hope.”

The 2024 Windham Campbell Prizes and Festival will be held Sept. 17 to 20.