Jon Pineda is the author of six books. His recent novel Let’s No One Get Hurt was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and won the 2019 Library of Virginia’s Emyl Jenkins Sexton Literary Award for Fiction. His poetry collection Little Anodynes was selected by poet Nikky Finney for the Palmetto Poetry Series and won the 2016 Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry.
His other books include his debut novel Apology, winner of the 2013 Milkweed National Fiction Prize, his memoir Sleep in Me, a 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, The Translator’s Diary, winner of the 2007 Green Rose Prize for Poetry, and Birthmark, selected by poet Ralph Burns as winner of the 2003 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition.
His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. He lives in Virginia and teaches at William & Mary and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University.
His other books include his debut novel Apology, winner of the 2013 Milkweed National Fiction Prize, his memoir Sleep in Me, a 2010 Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, The Translator’s Diary, winner of the 2007 Green Rose Prize for Poetry, and Birthmark, selected by poet Ralph Burns as winner of the 2003 Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition.
His poems, essays, and short fiction have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. He lives in Virginia and teaches at William & Mary and in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University.
“Let’s No One Get Hurt is the evocative story of a free-spirited girl trying to find herself amid memories of her long-gone mother. The story is beautifully and even poetically told in Pearl’s first-person voice. . . The fully developed characters are as memorable as the lovely, sometimes melancholy story they people. A classic coming-of-age novel that lingers with the reader long after the last page.”
―Booklist (starred review)
“Jon Pineda’s Little Anodynes is a collection full of awe and great tenderness. Each prose poem presents a prismatic shard of memory, glancing across time from Pineda’s wrenching recollections of his father to fleeting moments with his own children, where he exposes them to the wondrous details of the natural world. Little Anodynes is a sensuous and poignant read, filled with lustrous fragmentary scenes of sense and memory. Absolutely captivating.”
—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
“Sleep in Me is the rare memoir that takes nothing for granted. . . . [Pineda’s] concentrated, vivid scenes move along the edges of silence and speech, shadowing a young man’s physical prowess and his sister’s broken body, a far-flung family and inborn dislocation, variously furious, tender, devastated, and gallant.”
—Robert Polito, author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson
“The Translator's Diary reminds us that one of poetry’s necessary functions is translation—of literal experience and abstract emotion, the personal and shared. With beautiful formal precision, Pineda moves skillfully from couplets to sonnets to lyric sequence, carefully 'pressing syllables against the dark' in this timeless, poignant volume.”
—Claudia Emerson, author of Late Wife