Poets & Writers Blogs

New York City's Center for Fiction, formerly the Mercantile Library, has announced the seven-strong shortlist for its Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. The ten-thousand-dollar award will be given at the Center's annual benefit on December 6, where the organization will also honor Scribner editor in chief Nan Graham with the Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction.

The shortlisted debut novels are The Free World by David Bezmozgis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein (Norton), Daughters of the Revolution by Carolyn Cooke (Knopf),  The History of History by Ida Hattemer-Higgins (Knopf), Lamb by Bonnie Nadzam (Other Press), Shards by Ismet Prcic (Black Cat), and Touch by Alexi Zentner (Norton).

The award, formerly the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, has gone in previous years to Karl Marlantes, John Pipkin, Hannah Tinti, Junot Díaz, and Marisha Pessl.

In the video below, shortlisted author Sarah Braunstein discusses her debut, which was seven years in the making.

Washington, D.C.–based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about participating in a P&W-supported reading curated by the creative writing program at New York University in April 2010.

Raina J. Leon, January Gill O’Neil, and myself—I couldn't have asked for more. The three of us at NYU on a rainy Friday night. And, Cornelius Eady and Yusef Komunyakaa sat in the audience alongside emerging poet Rickey Laurentis and Catherine Barnett, a professor at NYU. The room was claustrophobic...in a good way. People squeezed in tight with nothing but poetry keeping them from going out into the rain.

I still remember Raina’s final poem about her brother. Haunting, the poem has left a lasting impression. Many of her poems do this, give me pause. And January, January read the best sex poem I’ve heard in years! A poem so filled with yearning and the unexpected that I thought the audience would soon depart to find love in the rain. The audience stayed, and allowed me to read a poem or two.

A few weeks before the reading, I Skyped with Catherine Barnett’s class. Some students from that class showed up, and one of the coolest things happened. Paul, one of Catherine's students, gave me The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh. He took the time to pass on the book and make some really humbling comments about my work. Folks read and write for millions of reasons, but the one that is most important to me is connecting with others.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, established nearly a century ago, was awarded over the weekend to California author Tatjana Soli for her first book, The Lotus Eaters (St. Martin's Press, 2010). Soli received the award, which carries a prize of ten thousand pounds (more than sixteen thousand dollars) and is administered by the University of Edinburgh, at the Edinburgh Book Festival.

A panel of University of Edinburgh professors and postgraduate students selected Soli's Vietnam War–era novel from a shortlist that included David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (Random House) and two other debut novels, Julie Orringer's The Invisible Bridge (Knopf) and Michael Nath's La Rochelle (Route). Orringer also hails from the United States (Mitchell and Nath are from the United Kingdom).

Past winners of the award include Nadine Gordimer, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Muriel Spark, and Evelyn Waugh. The prize was founded in 1919 by the widow of publisher James Tait Black to honor novels published in the previous calendar year.

In the video below, Soli discusses her origins in the short story and how she built her novel over time, as well as what she's learned about the importance of being an advocate for one's own work. "The career is so hard," she says, "that I wanted to wait and write the kind of stories that I want to write. And so I thought...if the novel gets published, good, and if it doesn't, at least I did what I wanted to do."

Since 2007, P&W has supported literary events in Houston, Texas. Literal, Latin American Voices, an award-winning bilingual magazine, was among the first Houston organizations supported by P&W. We asked its founder and director, Rose Mary Salum, author of the short story collection Spaces in Between, to share her experience as a presenter of Latin American literature and art.

What was your most successful literary program?
One of the most successful programs we hosted this year was Poetics of Displacement: Latin American Émigré Writers and the Creative Imagination. When Gisela Heffes invited us to collaborate with Rice University on this series, we immediately agreed. The response was amazing, especially to Sergio Ramírez, who I introduced! People approached me to express their absolute satisfaction. 

What makes your programs unique?
We invite established authors from Latin America, who are perhaps not as well-known in the United States. Everyone is familiar with the boom authors—the García Marquezs and Vargas Llosas. Besides these magnificent authors, there is a vast array of writers who are innovative and at the vanguard of literature. We have always questioned the practice of promoting writers familiar to our audiences to minimize the risk of failure. Ultimately, the quality of work is what must win in the end. Having a magazine with these characteristics (bilingual with Latin American subject matter, but still international) puts us in the peculiar place of voicing a de-centered point of view that steers away from the dominant culture, and we want to keep going this way. The United States is becoming more and more aware of the vast repository of literature that exists “down there.”

How do you find and invite readers?
I carefully choose dates and venues to make it easy for people to visit. There’s a huge niche for Latin American writers and readers in the United States, but we are scattered. Houston is a gateway at the perfect geographical point of connection between a continent with two languages. The mission of Literal is to exploit this location and get these cultures closer to each other.

Has literary presenting informed your writing life?
Every time I research new authors and read their books, their work has such an impact on me that some of my guests become characters in my fiction.

What is the value of literary programs in your community?
We cannot ignore the globalized world where influences roam freely. A program about literature is all about exchanging ideas, perspectives, and culture. Having said that, the programs we organize are always centered on the idea of being a platform for dialog, even if we are not familiar with other cultures within our own borders. “There is a tendency to abstract and aestheticize the colossal displacement of peoples and their cultures generated by globalization,” explains Lorraina Pinnell. A publication like Literal has a special role in addressing, in concrete terms and forms, cross-cultural contacts whirling through Canada, the United States, and Latin America. For our part, we are dedicated to resisting this tendency to abstract an entire reality; the publication and, moreover, the events we organize present distinct regions of the Americas in their various and sometimes clashing embodiments.

Photo: P&W-supported writer Sergio Ramírez with Gisela Heffes of Rice University. Credit: Enrique Vazquez.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Houston is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.

The winner of this year's Edwin Morgan Poetry Prize, the largest U.K.-based award for a single poem, was announced earlier today at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. Scottish poet Jane McKie, who runs the small publisher Knucker Press, was chosen from an all-female shortlist to win the five thousand pound prize (roughly $8,250) for her poem "Leper Window, St. Mary the Virgin."

Judge Kona Macphee says the poem, while relatively brief at forty-seven words, "epitomizes everything I love about poetry. It revels in the musicality of language and is magnificently concise, evoking a whole lost world in a dozen elegantly understated lines."

McKie has been previously honored for her debut collection, Morocco Rococo (Cinnamon Press), which was awarded the Scottish Arts Council's prize for a first book in 2007. To read her Morgan Prize–winning poem, visit the Guardian's website.

The annual prize, named for the late Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, is given for a poem by a writer of any nationality.

Washington, D.C.-based poet Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Shahid Reads His Own Palm and the memoir A Question of Freedom, blogs about participating in the P&W-supported reading at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. in April 2010.

Kim Roberts's anthology, Full Moon on K Street: Poems About Washington, D.C., brought D.C. poets together at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. on a sunny April Sunday in 2010. 

As soon as I arrived, I began reading a poem for Mississippi Avenue. The poem is about a couple of kids I once knew. They would play what we use to call throwback. Throwback is a game in which players would toss a football (or any ball) into a crowd of people, and then begin chasing the person who caught it. If the ball is memory, then the boys doing the chasing are hungry to remember. Full Moon on K Street is a little like that: memories we toss into crowds, then chase down. 

Just as good as the reading was Roberts's welcome. She relived the history of the project and the tidbits of D.C. history that can be found within the book as an accompaniment to the poems. Full Moon on K Street is history and poetry. Truth is, Roberts's anthology is about making memories live in the present...that’s what the reading was about too.

Photo: Reginald Dwayne Betts. Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

Support for Readings/Workshops events in Washinton, D.C., is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from the Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.