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 Academy of American Poets announced this afternoon that Anna Moschovakis has received its 2011 James Laughlin Prize. She receives the honor, which comes with a prize of five thousand dollars, for her second collection, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, published by Coffee House Press.

"Moschovakis boldly writes as though Plato had never kicked poets out of the Republic," says judge Brian Teare. "In You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake, she takes up the citizen's task of thinking through political and existential issues relevant to lives lived in increasing dependence on Internet access and globalization both."

Beneath their controlled and imperturbable surfaces, her poems perform the painful experience of the complicity with injustice that comes with citizenship—while lamenting colonization, opportunism, and capitalism, her poems search themselves for the common root of the urge toward empire, asking: 'Is it more than you would have done?'"

Teare was joined in the selection of the winning book by poets Juliana Spahr and Mónica de la Torre.

Moschovakis, who splits her time between New York City and the Catskills, is also an editor with the Ugly Duckling Presse publishing collective and a translator. Her first book is I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006).

The Academy awards the James Laughlin Prize annually to recognize a second poetry collection.

Anna Moschovakis Reads from You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake (Feb. 2011, Coffee House Press) from CoffeeHousePress on Vimeo.

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."

In Peter Schjeldahl's article, "Roots: Hopper's House," which appeared in the July 11 & 18, 2011, issue of the New Yorker, he describes the history of the Edward Hopper House Art Center in Nyack, New York, mentioning that performance artist Karen Finley conducted writing classes there this summer, during which she assigned her students to "imagine and describe their personal summer interiors." Now that the season is coming to a close, imagine your summer interior and write a poem that describes it.