Two writers recently received laurels, including a cash prize and the promise of publication of their respective books, from University of Nebraska Press, but two runners up were missing from this year's roll of winners.

Due to budget constraints, the Prairie Schooner Book Prizes (named for the university's literary journal) were awarded to only first-place authors this year, poet James Crews and fiction writer Greg Hrbek, each of whom won three thousand dollars.

Crews, who has an MFA from University of Wisconsin in Madison and has seen poems published in Prairie Schooner in the past, won for his first collection, The Book of What Stays. He has been a student at Portland, Oregon's the Attic writing center and, according to a shout-out on their Web site, also volunteers for AmeriCorps.

Hrbek won for his short story collection Destroy All Monsters, which follows his debut book, the novel The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly (William Morrow, 1999). He earned his MFA at University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and is a writer-in-residence at Skidmore College in Sarasota Springs, New York.

According to managing editor James Engelhardt, the press will reinstitute its two one-thousand-dollar runner-up prizes, which were given last year to poet Nicole Cooley and fiction writer Garth Risk Hallberg (the winners were Shane Book and Ted Gilley), as soon as the economy permits. More details about the awards, now in their ninth year, are available on the University of Nebraska Press Web site.

The Poetry Foundation has revealed the twenty-nine finalists for its five coveted Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship awards. The winners of the fifteen-thousand-dollar prizes, given annually to support poets between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one in their writing and study of poetry, will be announced by September 1.

Out of a reported eleven-hundred entrants, the finalists are:
Justin Boening
Julie Brown
Lily Brown
Kara Candito
George David Clark
Brooklyn Copeland
Tarfia Faizullah
Patrick Ryan Frank
Andrew Grace
Miriam Bird Greenberg
Chelsea Jennings
Paul Killebrew
Nate Klug
Laura Koritz
Brandon Kreitler
Dora Malech
Jamaal May
Amanda Nadelberg
Kathryn Nuerenberger
Idra Novey
Brittany Perham
Cherry Pickman
Frances Justine Post
Courtney Queeney
Margaret Reges
Christopher Robinson
Sarah Schweig
Christopher Shannon
Will Tyler

In the video below, finalist Idra Novey reads from her debut collection The Next Country, published by Alice James Books in 2008 as part of the Kinereth Gensler Award.

On July 23, Publisher’s Marketplace reported that agent Julie Barer of Barer Literary sold Nick Dybek's debut novel, When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, after an auction during which five publishers made offers, to editor Sarah Bowlin at Riverhead Books.

Most writers, when they read news like this, assume such deals result from a combination of talent and luck. Often overlooked is the hard work put in by both author and agent, after they join forces, to make the manuscript submission-ready. We asked Dybek how the author-agent relationship worked in his case, and here’s what he had to say.

“By the time I began working with Julie Barer, I’d been scrubbing and polishing a novel for almost four years, and I felt the manuscript was almost as good as it would ever be. Julie’s warm and enthusiastic response to the book served to reinforce this delusion, at least at first. Consequently, when her revision letter and mark-up arrived a month later, suggesting what felt like a mountain of substantive changes and cuts, I have to admit my day was ruined. It wasn’t that I was unused to or resistant to criticism; years of writing workshops had given me calluses. But, for the first time, I didn’t have the option of ignoring those suggestions I instinctively, if inexplicably, resisted. ‘Give an editor an excuse to turn a project down,’ Julie often said, ‘and he will.’ Though she never demanded that I take her advice, she was seldom impressed by my flailing explanations as to why I wanted that paragraph or this scene or that chapter to stay the same.

"It took me four months to write a draft responding to Julie’s initial comments. And then, over a period of about nine months, with Julie’s patient help, I wrote another draft and another and another. This was some of the most difficult work I’ve ever done, at least partially because of how conflicted I felt about the process. Part of me was impatient, frustrated at having to address problems in the manuscript I wasn’t sure were problems, unsure that I could even bear to read a scene, a paragraph, a sentence again. But another part of me was purely and immensely grateful that a pro like Julie was taking my work so seriously, spending her weekends reading my manuscript for the second, third, fourth, and fifth times. Though many of the revisions I made were painful in the moment, I haven’t regretted a single one. And I realize now that Julie was holding my work to a standard that I should have held it to all along.”

The Arvon Poetry Prize, established thirty years ago by poet and husband of Sylvia Plath Ted Hughes, is now accepting entries. Until August 16, poets from around the world are invited to submit poems (with a seven-pound fee per piece) for the seventy-five-hundred-pound prize (a little less than twelve hundred dollars) sponsored by the British writing organization the Arvon Foundation.

Second- and third-place prizes of twenty-five hundred pounds and one thousand pounds, respectively, will also be given. Winners will be individually notified by October 1, and an announcement will be made in London on November 4.

The judges will be U.K. poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who last year launched the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry won by Alice Oswald; Elaine Feinstein, poet, translator, and Hughes biographer whose first collection, The Circle (Faber Finds, 1970), was a semifinalist for the Lost Man Booker Prize; and Sudeep Sen, whose most recent collection is Letters of Glass (Wings Press, 2010).

For a list of previous winners (including former U.K. poet laureate Andrew Motion) and complete guidelines are available on the Arvon Foundation Web site.

In the video below, judge Duffy's poem "Mrs. Midas" is adapted in animation. The text of the poem is also available on the Web.