Carol Shields Prize Welcomes Jamie Figueroa and Leigh Haber to Board of Directors
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction is delighted to welcome two new members to our Board of Directors: Jamie Figueroa and Leigh Haber!
Jamie Figueroa is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer. Longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and shortlisted for the Reading the West Book Award, Figueroa’s debut novel “brims with spellbinding prose, magical elements, and wounded, full-hearted characters that nearly jump off the page” (Publishers Weekly). Figueroa’s writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Emergence Magazine, Elle, McSweeney’s, Agni, The New York Times, and The Boston Review among others. She is the recipient of a Truman Capote Award, a Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award, and was a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe Scholar. Her memoir in essays, Mother Island, is due out in the spring of 2024 from Pantheon Books.
Boricua (Afro-Taíno) by way of Ohio, Figueroa’s mixed-race Puerto Rican heritage of Black/Indigenous/Spanish drives her fiction and creative nonfiction themes. As a woman of color from the Caribbean diaspora, she writes into the complexities of a multi-faceted identity, which together with place/belonging, ancestry/erasure, and familial legacy/inheritance are woven into the rupture/repair of ongoing colonization and mainland — island relations.
As an educator, Figueroa has taught creative writing for the last fifteen in a variety of different communities — as an artist in the school with El Otro Lado, as a multi-genre instructor at New Mexico School for the Arts, as a community creative writing facilitator with organizations such as Little Globe, SOMOS, and Santa Fe Arts Institute, as well as a guest lecturer and visiting writer in colleges and universities throughout the western US. In 2017, Figueroa was Goddard College's first faculty hire for the newly developed focus "Indigenous and Decolonial Art Practice" in the MFA of Interdisciplinary Arts at Port Townsend.
Figueroa currently teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the Institute of American Indian Arts as well as with Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) dedicated exclusively since 1999 to multi-genre BIPOC writers.
In August of 2023, Figueroa will begin the PhD program, “Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership” at Southwestern College where her focus will be on Women Writers of the Caribbean who identify as Afro-Caribbean and/or Indigenous and the ways they link creativity with expressions of sovereignty.
Figueroa served on the Author’s Committee of the CSP for the first and second years of the prize. For the third year, she is serving as co-chair along with Merilyn Simonds.
She currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, but spends regular time in Ontario with her husband, their son, and her husband's family and his Oneida community. Their son Tsítso Kalaná (Fox Song) will turn four in December 2023.
Leigh Haber is a longtime book publishing veteran who for the last ten years ran Oprah's Book Club and was Books Director for O, the Oprah Magazine and Oprah Daily. In that role, she curated OBC selections with Oprah and also oversaw all of the books coverage in the magazine and later the website. Haber also wrote speeches and features for Oprah, and wrote scripts for many of her interviews.
Prior to that, for decades Haber worked as an executive editor in book publishing for various companies, acquiring and editing books by authors such as Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, Tess Gallagher, Terry Gross, Steve Martin, Al Gore, and Percival Everett, to name a very few. She became an editor after spending years as a book publishing publicity director.
Currently, Haber works as a strategic advisor to organizations such as Girls Write Now, Equality Now, and Zibby Owens Media, and is also an independent writer and editor.
She raised her two sons in Maplewood, NJ, where she continues to reside.
