Late last year we told you about Cave Canem's announcement of the inaugural Cave Canem Northwestern Press Poetry Prize, a second book award for African American poets. Six months later, the nonprofit has announced the first winner of the prize: Indigo Moor for his book Through the Stonecutter's Window. John Keene, who, along with Reginald Gibbons and Parneshia Jones, judged the prize, wrote that Moor's poems "open a sustained and impressive dialogue with the visual arts, history, the natural world, and the poet's dreams and nightmares, while dancing poly-rhythmically across and down each page."

Moor's first poetry collection, Tap-Root, was published in 2006 by Main Street Rag as part of its Editor's Select Poetry Series. Northwestern University Press will publish Through the Stonecutter's Window in March 2010. 

In addition, two poets received honorable mention: Remica Bingham for "What We Ask of Flesh" and JoAnne McFarland for "Acid Rain." 

In case you missed it, last month Independent Publisher announced the winners of the 2009 “IPPY” Awards, honoring the year’s best independently published books. There were more than four thousand entries in eighty-five national and regional categories. Here are a few of the recent winners:

Poetry: The Baseball Field at Night (Lost Horse Press) by Patricia Goedicke and or words to that effect (openDmusic) by Dave Tutin

Literary Fiction: Adam the King (Other Press) by Jeffrey Lewis

Short Story Fiction: The Cult of Quick Repair (Coteau Books) by Dede Crane

Essay/Creative Nonfiction: An Enemy of the People: The Unending Battle Against Conventional Wisdom (Doukathsan Press) by Lawrence R. Velvel

The annual awards are intended to bring increased recognition to books published in the past year by independent and university presses as well as self-published titles. The awards program was launched in 1996 and is open to all members of the independent publishing industry.

C. Max Magee, a contributor to Poets & Writers Magazine who writes about books at themillions.com, recently updated his ranking of prizewinning novels based on the number of prizes a book has won and the number of times it has been named a finalist or appeared on a shortlist. Taking into account six major prizes—the Booker, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Costa Book Award—Magee concluded that Edward P. Jones's The Known World, is the most celebrated novel of the last fifteen years. The 2003 novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC, and the Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Coming in at a close second is Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. For the complete list and a note on Magee's methodology, visit his blog.

Below is a video of Jones's keynote address at the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Awards ceremony.

A recent survey conducted by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) suggests that half of the artists living in New York State make less than twenty-five thousand dollars per year. Whether or not any of the 134 individuals who were recently awarded NYFA's annual fellowship grants fall into that category is unknown, but all of them will no doubt benefit from the unrestricted grants worth seven thousand dollars each.

The grants were given in eight categories, including film, digital/electronic arts, and interdisciplinary work. The fellows in poetry are E. J. Antonio, Edmund Berrigan, Tina Chang, Monica de la Torre, LaTasha Diggs, Marcella Durand, Alan Gilbert, Jennifer Hayashida, Lisa Jarnot, Mara Jebsen, Suji Kim, Anna Moschovakis, Willie Perdomo, Julie Sheehan, Patricia Smith, Sue Song, Paige Taggart, and Anne Tardos.

The fellows in nonfiction literature are Jo Ann Beard, Allison Cobb, Sarah Dohrmann, Ellen Graf, Sabine Heinlein, Hettie Jones, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro, Andrew Postman, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Phillip Robertson, Gabrielle Selz, Ginger Strand, Rene Vasicek, and Eben Wood.

Fellowships are awarded to writers and artists at all career levels and are intended to give them the means to continue making work despite financial restraints.