Iowa Writers' Workshop alumna Jennifer duBois (Master of Fine Arts 2009) was one of the 10 emerging writers conferred a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award at a ceremony in New York City on Oct. 21.

The Whiting Writers' Awards are given annually to 10 emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and plays. The awards, of $50,000 each, are based on accomplishment and promise, and they are awarded with the goal of supporting writers early in their careers so they can focus on their work.

DuBois’s debut novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was the winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction, the Northern California Book Award for Fiction, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Prize for Debut Fiction, and was honored by the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” program. Her just-published second novel, Cartwheel, tells the story of an American foreign exchange student accused of murdering her roommate in Argentina.

Currently a teacher in the MFA program at Texas State University-San Marcos, duBois said that winning the Whiting Award will enable her “to keep writing at the center of my life as I work on my third novel.”

The Iowa Writers' Workshop is a graduate program in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.