April 13, 2011 Beth Bachmann, an assistant professor in the creative-writing program at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, has won the prestigious Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. The prize, which carries a stipend of $1,000, is given to a work in progress.
April 12, 2011 Adam Prince, a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has sold his first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men. The book will appear late next year from Black Lawrence Press. This is the same publisher which will be bringing out a new poetry chapbook by Prince’s wife, Charlotte Pence. Clearly the Pence-Prince family is having a very good year in a very lousy publishing climate.
April 11, 2011 On April 10, 1861, Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard, who led the Confederate forces at Charleston, South Carolina, demanded that the Union surrender Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. U.S. Major Robert Anderson refused. On April 12, the Confederates opened fire in the opening battle of the Civil War. To mark the 150th anniversary of this epic conflict, the Modern Library is reissuing Shelby Foote’s masterful three-volume history of the war, and PBS is once again airing the Ken Burns documentary that prominently featured interviews with Foote.
April 8, 2011 The four starred reviews—one from every pre-publication review site in the industry—for Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray was a pretty good clue that this debut YA novel was bound to be a big hit, but now the glowing reviews are really rolling in for the Nashville novelist.
April 7, 2011 In March, the NPR book club read Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone, and today Verghese answers questions posted by the audience on the NPR Books Facebook page.
April 5, 2011 Khaled Mattawa is an international finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry announced today. The other three international finalists are Seamus Heaney, Philip Mosley, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. The Griffin Prize is one of the most lucrative awards in poetry: each of the finalists will receive an honorarium of 10,000 dollars; the winner, who will be announced on June 1 in Toronto, will receive 65,000 dollars.
