The award ceremony, author discussion, and reception will take place Wednesday, March 25 at 7 p.m., at the Mandell Jewish Community Center, 335 Bloomfield Avenue, West Hartford, Connecticut.
The Wallant Award was established by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford in 1963, and honors the memory of the late Edward Lewis Wallant, author of The Pawnbroker and other works of fiction. It is presented to a writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance to American Jewish history and culture.
In Next Stop, his first novel, Resnick deploys speculative and fantastical elements—including a black hole swallowing Israel, unexplained global anomalies, and dystopian upheaval—as powerful metaphors for rupture: the rupture of homeland, the rupture of safety, the rupture of history, the rupture of memory. At the same time, Next Stop remains grounded in the most intimate and human of dramas: a family trying to survive and to love even as the world collapses around them. By blending magical realism, sci-fi, dystopia, and Jewish text, Resnick tells a story in which historical patterns of persecution and displacement are refracted through an alternative, deeply uncertain Jewish future, expanding what Jewish fiction can do.
According to the Award judges, “Next Stop is a daring and deeply original work of American Jewish fiction that pushes the boundaries of genre to confront profound and urgent questions about Jewish identity, history, antisemitism, belonging, and survival. Resnick’s ambition, inventiveness, and moral urgency make Next Stop a singular and worthy recipient of the 2025 Edward Lewis Wallant Award.”
Resnick is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in New York. Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he lives in Pelham with his wife and two children. His non-fiction has appeared in the Washington Post, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. Next Stop was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
For more information on the Edward Lewis Wallant Award and past recipients, visit www.hartford.edu/wallant.
For more information or to register for the award ceremony, call 860.768.4964 or email mgcjs@hartford.edu.