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A team representing Saint Paul has won the twentieth annual National Poetry Slam (NPS) in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Minnesotans beat out sixty-seven other teams from across North America to claim the two-thousand-dollar grand prize on August 8. Rounding out the final standings were, in order, teams from Albuquerque, San Francisco, and New York City.
Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) has awarded Deb Olin Unferth the Cabell First Novelist Award for Vacation, published by McSweeney’s Books in 2008. She will receive five thousand dollars and an all-expenses-paid trip to Richmond to attend VCU’s First Novelist Festival in November.
Unferth has previously published a short story collection, Minor Robberies, one-third of the boxed set One Hundred and Forty Five Stories in a Small Box (McSweeney's Books, 2007), which also includes How the Water Feels to the Fishes by Dave Eggers and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape by Sarah Manguso.
Unferth’s debut novel was selected for the honor by previous prizewinners Travis Holland and Peter Orner, and Andrew Blossom, the editor of Makeout Creek magazine and the anthology Richmond Noir, forthcoming from Akashic Books in March 2010. Holland won the 2008 award for The Archivist’s Story (Dial Press, 2007), and Orner won in 2007 for The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo (Little, Brown, 2006).
This year's finalists were David Mura for Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire (Coffee House Press) and Jesmyn Ward for Where the Line Bleeds (Agate Bolden), recently nominated for a Legacy Award from the Hurston/Wright Foundation.
The annual award is named for prolific Richmond author and poet James Branch Cabell, known for his contributions to fantasy fiction, though he also wrote literary works. His debut novel,
The Eagle’s Shadow—the first of fifty-two volumes of work—was published by Doubleday in 1904.
The next deadline for publishers to submit nominations is September 15, for books published in January through June of this year. The entry deadline for books released in July through December is January 15, 2010.
Google kicked off a new program yesterday that will allow authors who have released their books under the Creative Commons license to distribute them free through Google Books. Participants will be able to select from among seven versions of the Creative Commons agreement, which lets rightsholders make works openly available while still specifying how they may be used or altered.
Lost Horse Press has announced the winner of the 2009 Idaho Prize for Poetry. Stephen Gibson of West Palm Beach was named the recipient of the one-thousand-dollar prize, which includes publication of his winning collection, Frescoes, by Lost Horse Press. Carolyne Wright judged.
Gibson’s most recent book of poetry is Masaccio’s Expulsion, published in 2008, which won MARGIE/IntuiT House Press’s Robert E. Lee and Ruth I. Wilson Poetry Book Award, judged by Andrew Hudgins. His debut collection, Rorschach Art, was published by Red Hen Press in 2001. Frescoes will be released in February of next year.
Two runners-up for the Idaho Prize were also named. They are John Brady for Thunder Shakes the Snake: The Poetry of Cheng Hui and Matthew Thorburn for Every Possible Blue.
The longlisted finalists are John Bensko for Fur Traders on the Missouri, Esther Lee for little lung damage, James McKean for We Are the Bus, Peter Munro for Animal Kingdom, Richard Robbins for Radioactive City, Catherine Staples for Still-Life Breathing, Joe Wilkins for Ragged Point Road, and Maya Jewell Zeller for Rust Fish.
The book prize is given annually in August, and the next deadline for manuscript submissions is May 15, 2010.
Vietamese dissident Duong Thu Huong sits at a table in the Café Le Metro in Place Maubert in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris. In 1991 she was arrested for making critical remarks about the Communist Party's interests.
The One Pillar Pagoda, a historic Buddhist temple in Hanoi. The pagoda was built by Emperor Lý Thái Tông, who ruled from 1028 to 1054.
A pair of little kids climb on a Soviet-built MiG-17 jet fighter parked inside the gate of the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi.
Poet and fiction writer Dang Than (left) and Stephen Morison Jr. at the Dinh Lang Restaurant, a European-style café with tables overlooking Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi.
