Fall 2010/Winter 2011

PEN American Center announced the recipients of its 2010 Literary Awards. Winners included Susan Choi, who received the W. G. Sebald Award for a Fiction Writer in Mid-Career and $10,000; Theresa Rebeck, who received the Laura Pels Foundation Award for an American Playwright in Mid-Career and $7,500; Marilyn Hacker, who received the Voelcker Award for Poetry and $5,000; and Anne Carson, who received the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation and $3,000 for her translation from the Greek of An Oresteia. The winners and runners-up were honored at a ceremony in New York City on October 13.

The National Association of Science Writers awarded Susan Cohen a 2010 Science in Society Award, Book category, for Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry’s Quest to Manipulate Height (coauthored with Christine Cosgrove). J. Madeline Nash received the Local or Regional Science Reporting Award for her article “Bring in the Cows,” which appeared in High Country News. They each received a cash prize of $2,500 and an award at a November 7 meeting, in New Haven, Conn. The awards honor the best in investigative or interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact on society.

The nominees for the National Book Award included Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird, and Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown, for Young People’s Literature, and Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, for Nonfiction.

PEN Center USA announced the winners of its 2010 awards for writers living west of the Mississippi River. The winners included Paul Fleischman, The Dunder­heads, for Children’s/Young Adult Literature. Finalists included Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards, Fiction; and Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans, and Carol Sklenicka, Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, both in the Research Nonfiction category. The awards were presented at the 20th Annual Literary Awards Festival (“LitFest”) in Los Angeles on November 17.

Women Writing the West announced the winners of the 2010 WILLA Literary Awards for books published in 2009. The recipients included Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, Scholarly Non­fiction; Linda Hasselstrom, No Place Like Home: Notes from a Western Life, Creative Nonfiction; Jane Kirk­patrick, A Flickering Light, Original Softcover; and Randall Platt, Hellie Jondoe, Children’s/Young Adult Fiction & Nonfiction. The awards were presented at the annual conference in Arizona in October.

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants, by Jane S. Smith, received the 2010 Caroline Bancroft History Prize, which carries a cash award of $3,000. (The book also received a Merit Award for its cover design from the Bookbinders’ Guild of New York.) The award is sponsored by the Western History/Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library for the best book on Colorado or Western American History published in the previous year. Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, by Thomas G. Andrews, received the award in 2009.

The Society of Midland Authors held its 54th annual book awards banquet on May 11 in Chicago. Christine Taylor-Butler, Sacred Mountain: Everest, received first place in the Children’s Fiction category. Award finalists included Jane S. Smith, The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants, Biography; Gloria Whelan, Waiting for the Owl’s Call, Children’s Fiction; and Marc J. Sheehan, Vengeful Hymns, Poetry.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, was an Indie Next Pick for September.

Helen Barolini was honored for her distinguished career as an author at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Cen­ter annual benefit gala in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., on October 2.

Hester Bass received the 2010 Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children for The Secret World of Walter Anderson (illustrated by E.B. Lewis), presented by the National Council of Teachers of English. The book also received the 2010 award for Best Children’s/YA Book of the Year from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance and was named a NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Book for Young People and a Bank Street Best Children’s Book. It was also included on the Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s Best-of-the-Year List, and is a nominee for the 2011 Magnolia Award for Mississippi Chil­dren’s Choice. An exhibition based on the book is currently at the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Miss.

Spiritous Journey: A History of Drink, Book One, by Jared M. Brown and Anistatia Renard Miller, received a 2010 Gourmand World Cookbook award for Best Drink History in the UK, and was on the shortlist for Best Drink History in the World. Spiritous Journey: A History of Drink, Book Two received a Best Drinks Writing Award at the 2010 CLASS Awards, sponsored by CLASS magazine.

Paul Byall received the 2010 Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize for his short story, “Sequestered.“ The prize, sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network, carries a cash prize of $1,000 and possible publication in The Thomas Wolfe Review.

Mike Cox received the A.C. Greene Literary Award in honor of his body of work as an Austin-based author, journalist and historian. The award was presented at the 10th annual West Texas Book & Music Festival in Abilene on September 25 and was sponsored by the Friends of the Abilene Public Library and the Abilene Reporter-News.

Sue Eisenfeld was named a Goldfarb Family Fellow in Nonfiction by the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. The fellowship lasts two weeks and is fully funded by the Robert and Aida Goldfarb Art Law Literary Fund.

Encyclopedia of Pasta, by Oretta Zanini de Vita, translated by Maureen B. Fant, received the James Beard award for translation. Fant also received a Distin­guished Alumna Award from the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York.

Feminist Engagements: Forays into American Literature and Culture, by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, was named an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine. Fishkin, who was named the Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities by Stanford University in October, was also awarded the Mark Twain Circle of America’s Certificate of Merit for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain.

Dirk Hanson received a bronze medal in the Health/ Medicine/Nutrition category of the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards for The Chemical Carousel: What Science Tells Us About Beating Addiction.

Indiscreet, by Carolyn Jewel, received a Booksellers Best Award for Best Short Historical.

Unite or Die: How Thirteen States Became a Nation, by Jacqueline Jules, was awarded the 2010 Whitney & Scott Cardozo Award for Children’s Literature by the Library of Virginia at a gala celebration on October 16, 2010. The award honors outstanding works of children’s literature by authors in the mid-Atlantic region.

A short story by Marjorie Kemper, an Authors Guild member until her death last November, titled “Discovered America,” received the 2009 McGinnis Ritchie Award from the Southwest Review for the best work of fiction published in the journal that year.