Jennifer Clement (born 1960) is an American-Mexican author. Clement has written several novels, including Gun Love (2018) and Prayers for the Stolen (2014), and published several collections of poetry and the memoirs 'Widow Basquiat' (2001)and 'The Promised Party'(2024). She is the first and only woman president of PEN International, elected in 2015.
She is the co-director and founder, with her sister Barbara Sibley, of the San Miguel Poetry Week. Clement lives in Mexico City, Mexico.[when?][citation needed]
Writing career
Clement's first book, Widow Basquiat, is a memoir about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat's relationship with his muse Suzanne Mallouk—told from Mallouk's perspective.[2] It was originally published in 2000 and re-released in 2014 as Widow Basquiat: A Love Story.[3]Glenn O'Brien in Artforum wrote: "Magical…Widow Basquiat conjures real characters, a real time and real place. It's not theory – it's representation. … The life of Basquiat … is a joyous lightning bolt when it is described in true detail, as it is in Clement's extraordinary as-told-to poem."[4]
Prayers for the Stolen came out in 2014 and became a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice Book, First Selection for National Reading Group Month's Great Group Reads, and appeared internationally on many "Best Books of the Year" lists, including The Irish Times.[6]
Auf der Zunge ("On the Tip of the Tongue"[7]), was published by Suhrkamp in Germany in April 2022.[8]
Clement is also the author of several books of poetry: The Next Stranger with an introduction by W. S. Merwin (1993), Newton's Sailor, Lady of the Broom (2002) and Jennifer Clement: New and Selected Poems (2008).[citation needed]
Her prize-winning story A Salamander-Child is published as an art book, with work by the Mexican painter Gustavo Monroy.[citation needed]
Other activities
She is a member of Mexico's prestigious Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. Jennifer Clement, along with her sister Barbara Sibley, is the founder and director The San Miguel Poetry Week.[9]
She served as President of PEN Mexico from 2009 to 2012.[10] In 2015, she was elected as the first woman president of PEN International, an organization founded in 1921. Under her leadership, the groundbreaking PEN International Women's Manifesto and The Democracy of the Imagination Manifesto were created.[11]
As president of PEN Mexico she spoke extensively about the safety of journalists in Mexico and was instrumental in raising the issue and changing the law so that the killing of a journalist became a federal crime.[12]
In 2021 she was one of the authors who produced Pen International: An Illustrated History: Literature Knows No Frontiers.[13][14]
Film
Prayers for the Stolen, directed by Tatiana Huezo (titled Noche de fuego) and produced by Nicolas Celis and Jim Stark at Pimienta Films was Mexico's entry for the 2022 Oscars. Among many prizes, the film was awarded the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard Award.
Clement was awarded the National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship for Literature in 2012 for her novel Prayers for the Stolen and was honored with The Sara Curry Humanitarian Award for that work. She is also the recipient of the UK's Canongate Prize. Clement is a Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellow, the MacDowell Colony's Robert and Stephanie Olmsted Fellow for 2007-08 and, in 2015, was chosen to be a City of Asylum Resident in Pittsburgh, PA. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her new novel Gun Love. Gun Love was named one of Time magazine's top 10 books of 2019 and was also a New York Times Editor's Choice Book, and a National Book Award finalist, among other honors.[15][16]
Clement's books have been translated into 36 languages.[citation needed]
Other honors and awards include:
Sydney Harman Writer-in-Residence, Baruch College (City University of New York), 2020
Gun Love: National Book Award, finalist, 2018
Gun Love: Time magazine top 10 books of 2019
Gun Love: A New York Times Editor's Choice Book, 2018
HIPGiver Honor (honoring Latinos who have made exceptional contributions to their communities), US, 2016
Hermitage Residency, US, 2016
Grand Prix des Lectrices Lyceenes de Elle (sponsored by Elle Magazine, the French Ministry of Education and Maison des écrivains et de la littérature) France, 2015
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Finalist, US, 2015
City of Asylum Resident, Pittsburgh, PA, US, 2015
Community College of Baltimore County, Essex - Prayers for the Stolen: selected novel for the Community Book Connection Program 2015–2106
^Hamilton, Geoff; Jones, Brian (2009). "Clement, Jennifer p.68". Encyclopedia of Contemporary Writers and Their Work. Infobase Publishing. ISBN9781438129709. Retrieved 7 April 2011.
^"auf der Zunge liegen". Cambridge Dictionary. 15 November 2023. Retrieved 22 November 2023.
^Clement, Jennifer (10 April 2022). "Auf der Zunge. Buch von Jennifer Clement". Suhrkamp Verlag (in German). Translated by von Schweder-Schreiner, Nicolai. Retrieved 22 November 2023.
^Pen International: An Illustrated History: Literature Knows No Frontiers, by Carles Torner, Jennifer Clement, Peter D. McDonald, Jan Martens, Ginevra Avalle, Rachel Potter, and Laetitia Zecchini, 2021. Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Books, an imprint of Interlink Publishing Group.
^Bradford, Timothy. “PEN International: An Illustrated History by Ginevra Avalle et Al.” World Literature Today 96, no. 3 (2022): 64–65.
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