Melville House, the New York City indie press, has launched its first book trailer contest and is currently accepting submissions. Awards will be given for best big-budget trailer—for books released by major houses or trailers with budgets over five hundred dollars—best low-budget trailer, best cameo in a trailer, best performance by an author, and the "least likely to sell the book" trailer. Finalists for the Moby Awards, named for the press's book blog MobyLives, will be feted on May 20 at the posh Griffin cocktail lounge in New York City, in the company of publishing professionals and "surprise celebrity guests."

"Yes, that’s right: We will judge you," reads today's post on MobyLives. "Well, we’ll judge your book trailers, which one might consider reflections of you (and your work), whether you’re an author, editor, agent, publicist—whoever!" Panelists Megan Halpern, a publicist; Carolyn Kellogg of the Los Angeles Times blog Jacket Copy; Jason Boog of the blog GalleyCat; Troy Patterson of Slate; and Colin Robinson, publisher of OR Books, will select winners from among nominations—which can be made by anyone via a comment on the contest Web page—of videos produced between April 2009 and April 2010. A shortlist will be announced during awards week.

Also accepting entries to its book trailer contest for indie titles is ForeWord Reviews. The submission period closes at the end of this week.

The video below, promoting James Greer's novel The Failure (Akashic Books), is one of many trailers that have already been nominated for the Moby.

The Los Angeles Times announced on Friday the winners of its 2009 Book Awards. Brenda Hillman took the prize in poetry for Practical Water (Wesleyan University Press), Rafael Yglesias won in fiction for A Happy Marriage (Scribner), and Philipp Meyer won the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction for American Rust (Spiegel & Grau), while David Mazzucchelli received the inaugural award for a graphic novel for Asterios Polyp (Pantheon).

The judges of the graphic novel prize—the first major book award to honor the genre—called Mazzucchelli's book "a beautifully executed love story, a smart and playful treatise on aesthetics, a perfectly unified work whose every formal element, down to the stitching on its spine, serves its themes."

Hillman, an experimental poet who teaches at St. Mary's College of California, was cited for her "commitment to innovation and interiority…galvanized by the need to speak back to the stark realities of our situation."

Debut author Meyer was commended by the judges for the "deep compassion" with which he renders his novel's characters, residents of a deteriorating Pennsylvania steel town. Yglesias's novel was called "an ennobling picture of lives lived over decades, in sickness and health, brought vibrantly to life." 

Also receiving recognition for their literary endeavors were Dave Eggers and Evan S. Connell. Eggers, who was given the Innovator's Award for his work as a publisher and the founder of the youth organization 826 National, also the prize for current interest book for Zeitoun (McSweeney's Books), a work of narrative journalism centered on a married couple who survived Hurricane Katrina. Connell received the Robert Kirsch Award for his oeuvre as a writer living in the American West.

Inspired by a rumination on the New York Times Paper Cuts blog that asked whether a blog could ever rise to the level of literature, the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction is asking blog readers and writers to nominate "vibrant new voices with interesting, true stories to tell" for a special issue of the magazine. Specifically, the magazine is looking for entries of literary ("narrative, narrative, narrative") blog posts that were published between November 1, 2009, and March 31 of this year.

The winning essays will be published in the July 2010 issue of Creative Nonfiction and each author will receive a fifty-dollar reward for one-time reprint rights.

Can a blog post transcend the tendency of its kind toward, as Gregory Cowles of Paper Cuts puts it, being "too topical and too fleeting to count as literature"? The deadline for nominations of previously blogged essays—your own, a friend's, a stranger's—totaling no more than two thousand words each is Monday, April 26. More information is available on Creative Nonfiction's Web site.