Overview: The University of California Riverside celebrated the Emory Elliott Book Awards and Reception, which recognized three books that explored the themes of hunger, grief, and performance in the context of survival. The authors, including this year’s winner Dana Simmons, fostered dialogue about communities living inside systems that do not see them, are not organized to meet their needs, or actively work against them. The award recognizes a CHASS faculty book that best reflects the values of the late professor Emory Elliott, including the ability to recognize complexity while seeking clarity, the courage to advance a conversation, and a commitment to public-facing humanism.
Aryana Noroozi
The University California Riverside community gathered for the Emory Elliott Book Awards and Reception – which featured three different books – one on hunger and political violence in the U.S, another on grief and poetic form, and one on performance and exile in the Burmese diaspora. Each contributed to a shared conversation about survival.
The authors included this year’s winners, Dana Simmons, author of On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic; Allison Benis White author of A Magnificent Loneliness, and Emily Hue author of Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora. Simmons is the Chair of the Department of Society, Environment, and Health Equity (SEHE), Benis White is in the Department of Creative Writing and Hue is in the Department of Ethnic Studies.
Together, they fostered dialogue about communities living inside systems that do not see them, are not organized to meet their needs, or actively work against them.
The Emory Elliott Book Awards are an annual honor, selected by a campus selection committee, that recognizes a CHASS faculty book which best reflects the values of the late professor Emory Elliott. Those values include the ability to recognize complexity while still seeking clarity, the courage to advance a conversation rather than repeat settled consensus, and the commitment to a generous, public-facing humanism.
Together, the three honored books illuminate what it means to survive inside systems that are indifferent or hostile. Simmons’ work shows how hunger operates as a deliberate technology of control – from shifting blame from individual bodies to the policies and institutions that “make” people hungry.
Finalist Benis White’s A Magnificent Loneliness turns to grief and language, using a book-length poem that began with a single parrot feather to create a space where mystery, rage, beauty, and loss can exist without resolution.
Fellow finalist Emily Hue, in Performing Vulnerability: Risking Art and Life in the Burmese Diaspora, follows artists working under military rule, in exile, and under global funding pressures, asking how “freedom of expression” can be supported without turning pain into a performance requirement. Together, their work reflects Emory Elliott’s legacy by confronting complexity without cliché and inviting readers into more demanding, more generous conversations about justice, feeling, and responsibility.
Simmons, Benis White and Hue’s work maps a landscape in which hunger, loneliness, and vulnerability are not just private feelings but consequences of political, economic, and cultural choices. The award, made possible by gifts from Elliott’s family and friends, is more than a prize for a single book – but a statement about the product of the intellectual work of UC Riverside—Scholarship and art that engage the hardest truths of the present without surrendering nuance or empathy.