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Last night we attended a unique book launch for New York City poet Elana Bell, featured in our May/June 2012 issue's "Winners on Winning" feature. Bell, who incorporated a dance performance and fund-raiser into the celebration of her debut collection, is the recipient of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for Eyes, Stones, released in April by Louisiana State University Press.
When we interviewed Bell for our May/June article about the unexpected rewards of winning a book prize, she mentioned that she was using some of the prize money to realize an artistic vision. "Many of the poems in the collection are persona poems, in the voices of contemporary and historical characters who are inexorably linked to the land of Israel/Palestine," she said. "Sometime during the process of creating this book, I knew that I wanted to create a performance version based on the text. I wasn't sure what it would look like, but I knew it would be collaborative and somehow address the question: 'How can two narratives exist in one body?' When I found out I'd won the Whitman, I decided that rather than have a traditional book release party, I would create a performance piece with dancers and musicians addressing that question."
The piece premiered at a standing-room-only event that also included a silent art auction to benefit Just Vision, a nonprofit organization that promotes social justice in Israel and Palestine. A selection from the performance is featured in the video below.
[This article has been updated. An earlier version of this article failed to mention the sponsor for the Walt Whitman Award. The prize is given annually by the Academy of American Poets.]
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"Having been much criticized for lots of things I've talked about actually is a very liberating thing," says Joyce Maynard in this clip from Open Road Media. Maynard is the author of eleven books of fiction and nonfiction, including her bestselling memoir, At Home in the World, in which she revealed her relationship with J. D. Salinger when he was fifty-three and she was eighteen.
The Believer's May issue has arrived, and with it, the announcement of the magazine's literary awards for books of poetry and fiction published in 2011. The honors are given annually for poetry collections deemed by the magazine's editors to be "the finest and most deserving of greater recognition" and novels and short story collections that are the "strongest and most underappreciated of the year."
Massachusetts poet Heather Christle takes the second annual Believer Poetry Award for The Trees The Trees (Octopus Books), her "casually incandescent second collection." (Her third book, What Is Amazing, was released by Wesleyan University Press this past February.)
Author of three poetry collections himself, New York City author Ben Lerner receives the seventh annual Believer Book Award in fiction for his "hilarious and sensitive" debut novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (Coffee House Press). The book, which made it onto a number of best-of lists last year, was also a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Young Lions Fiction Award given by the New York Public Library.
Along with the winner announcements, the Believer also released a list of the books most nominated for shout-outs in its readers survey. Coming out on top in poetry are Tracy K. Smith's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Life on Mars (Graywolf Press), Dean Young's Fall Higher (Copper Canyon Press), and Carl Phillips's Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which won this year's Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry. In fiction, readers' most frequent picks were The Art of Fielding (Little, Brown) by Chad Harbach, Pulitzer-nominated Swamplandia! (Knopf) by Karen Russell, and The Sisters Brothers (Ecco) by Patrick deWitt. The full account (summer reading list, anyone?) is posted on the Believer's website.
In the video below, Christle reads from her winning book at the Stain of Poetry reading series in New York City.
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