Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council awards Maui poet Elliot Cades Award
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By Ryan Mitchel Collins
The Maui News
WAILUKU--Hawai'i Poet Laureate and Maui resident Brandy Nālani McDougall has been awarded the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, the most prestigious literary honor in Hawai'i.
McDougall was one of two recipients of the award, joining author Susan Scott of Oahu as the only two to receive the honor.
"Winning this award means the world to me because it is from our Hawai'i literary community--rich, diverse and talented community (in my eyes, the best) and I feel so happy and honored to be a part of it," McDougall told The Maui News in an interview Sunday. "So many of my poetry heroes have been Elliot Cades awardees."
Brandy Nālani McDougall, from the ahupua'a of Aʻapueo in Kula, Maui, and current Poet Laureate of Hawai'i, is the author of 'Aina Hānau: Birth Land (University of Arizona Press, 2023) and The Salt-Wind: Ka Makani Pa'akai, (Kuleana 'Oiwi Press, 2008). Her poetic work navigates through mo'olelo (history/story), moʻokū'auhau (geneaology), and ʻāina, reflecting on what it means to be a Kanaka ʻŌiwi daughter, woman, and mother amidst ongoing American colonialism, but also most importantly, ongoing aloha 'āina.
"Being Hawai'i Poet Laureate has given me the opportunity to work with so many amazing poets and storytellers and artists--some just starting out and others who have always been writing and telling stories," McDougall said. "I'm so grateful that this has helped me to expand and enrich my own poetic range and aesthetic, but beyond that, I hope this recognition through the Elliot Cades award also shines the light on how healing, community-fostering, and 'āina-connecting poetry writing can be.
Poetry has been a calling and a kuleana for me because it saved my life and continues to heal me in so many ways. In line with that, I will continue to share that message in poetry workshops and events (please follow the Hawai'i Humanities Council for info on our events) and encourage everyone to write their own poems and at stories. Later this year, Puka Kinikini, an online local poetry archive will be launched, too, which will help the amazing Hawai'i poetry that's out there be more visible, accessible and widely taught in our schools as the next generation of poets is raised. This is one of my signature projects as poet laureate. I also have the privilege of being one of the 2025 Hawai'i Triennial artists, so I am currently working on a series of poems "Aloha Kaʻapuni" that meditates on circulations of aloha during journeys around the world and our islands."
An associate professor of American Studies (specializing in Indigenous Studies) at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, McDougall is also the author of Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature, part of the Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies series published by University of Arizona Press in 2016 and winner of the Native American Literature Symposium's Beatrice Medicine Award for Published Monograph in 2017. A Ford and Mellon-Hawai'i fellow, McDougall is a graduate of the Kamehameha Schools, Whittier College, University of Oregon's Creative Writing MFA Program, and UH Mānoa's English department (Ph.D). She lives with her keiki in Kalaepōhaku, Honolulu, in the ahupua'a of Waikīkī on O'ahu.
Susan Scott wrote a weekly column called OceanWatch for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and later the Star-Advertiser from 1987 to 2020, and is the author, and co-author, of nine books about nature in Hawai'i, as well as her memoir, Call Me Captain, A Memoir of a Woman at Sea (2014, University of Hawai'i Press.) Two recent books are about kōlea (Pacific Golden Plovers) and manu-o-Kū (White Terns), University of Hawai'i Press. In 2020, Susan helped revise the 7th edition of the Hawaii Audubon Society's book, Hawai'i's Birds. Susan's interest in Hawai'i's birds resulted in the Hawai'i Audubon Society's Board of Directors electing her president of the Society in January 2022. A former registered nurse, Scott earned a bachelor's degree in biology from the UH Mānoa and is a graduate of the university's Marine Option Program, where she studied marine journalism. As a volunteer for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Susan has counted albatrosses at Pihemanu Kuaihelani (Midway Atoll), tagged crabs on Palmyra Atoll, and rescued monk seals and sea turtles at Kānemiloha'i (French Frigate Shoals.) Scott's newspaper column was discontinued during the pandemic, but through her work with the Audubon Society, she continues sharing her enthusiasm for Hawai'i's remarkable plants and animals.
The Cades Awards, given annually since 1988, were created by Charlotte and J. Russell Cades in memory of his brother, Elliot, a teacher and lover of literature. The awards come with a substantial cash prize for the recipients.
The Hawai'i Literary Arts Council also announced that Joy Kobayashi-Cintron and Wing Tek Lum have been selected as this year's of the Loretta D. Petrie Award for their many years of outstanding service to Hawai'i's literary community.
Joy Kobayashi-Cintron is the managing editor of Bamboo Ridge Press and has been involved in editing, organizing, and publishing nearly 60 issues of Hawai'i's premier literary anthology since 1995. She has participated in virtually every step of the publication process, even assisting with sales and deliveries of books and, with the help of her husband Xander Cintron-Chai, in the many details involved in readings and other activities designed to promote Bamboo Ridge publications and the more than 1,000 writers and artists whose work has appeared in them in the past four and a half decades. Numerous senior Bamboo Ridge leaders have joined in affirming her indispensable role in producing each issue.
Wing Tek Lum, an award-winning poet, is also the long-time business manager of Bamboo Ridge and the person credited with the financial survival over much of its 45-year history of Hawai'i's most enduring literary publication. He accepted the fiscal role in the 1980s and has shared his family business site for board meetings in its conference room and storage of materials in the basement. He also pitches in as a volunteer at readings and other events, helps out with book sales, furniture set-up and breakdown; makes deliveries, and chases down evaluation forms. He is a past Cades Award recipient and winner of the 1988 American Book Award and author of the soon-to-be-released The Oldtimers.
Petrie Award honorees each receive an engraved plaque and a check for $250. The awards, now in their eighth year, were inspired by a bequest from Loretta D. Petrie (1928-2014), an early leader of HLAC, a teacher and administrator at Chaminade, where she took an active role in its literary magazine and sustained her own lifelong interest in writing.
The Hawai'i Literary Arts Council was founded in 1974 to encourage and promote literature and literary activity of all sorts in Hawai'i.