By Fatima Salinas

Daniel Khalastchi, director of the Magid Center for Writing in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was among the winners of the Jewish Book Council's 74^th National Jewish Book Awards. Khalastchi won the Berru Poetry Award for his book, The Story of Your Obstinate Survival. 

The Jewish Book Council worked with more than 120 judges, who considered over 700 submissions.  

“I am deeply honored to be recognized with this award, and I am thankful to the Jewish Book Council for all they do to support writers and literature,” Khalastchi said. “To be in the company of this year’s impressive cohort of winners and finalists—to say nothing of the long and extraordinary list of past awardees—is inspiring and humbling.” 

Khalastchi, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of several books. The Story of Your Obstinate Survival is a survey of life’s calamities and the dogged persistence it takes to endure.  

Steeped in a landscape of personal and political perniciousness, the poems in the collection examine both the collective right to fight for justice and the individual experience of justifying choices made for better or for worse. 

“Relationships of all kinds—constituents and representatives, lovers and friends—clash and crash throughout the book, leading (I hope...at least once the fire and smoke clear) to an understanding that there is still a way to move forward even after chaos, disruption, loss, and political upheaval have enacted their wreckage,” Khalastchi added.  

Literary Hub, a book critic publication, described the book as a promiscuously overlapping Venn diagram of dream, satire, and present-day reality.  

“Daniel Khalastchi takes a primary driver of poetry, our boredom with conventional modes of expression, and applies it to the late-capitalist political and social upheavals whose bills we continually pay,” Literary Hub published.  

The Jewish Council established The National Jewish Awards in 1950 to recognize outstanding works for Jewish literature. An awards celebration will be held on March 12, 2025.