After a year in which must-read book lists notoriously shut out the talented ranks of female authors, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) has named four women poets, four women fiction writers, and four women memoirists finalists for its 2010 awards. In conjunction with the shortlists announcement last Saturday, Joyce Carol Oates was honored with the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award and New Yorker book and dance critic Joan Acocella received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

The finalists for the NBCC award in poetry are:
Rae Armantrout for Versed (Wesleyan)
Louise Glück for A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
D. A. Powell for Chronic (Graywolf Press)
Eleanor Ross Taylor for Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008 (Louisiana State University Press)
Rachel Zucker for Museum of Accidents (Wave Books)

In fiction, the finalists are:
Bonnie Jo Campbell for her story collection American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Marlon James for his novel The Book of Night Women (Riverhead)
Michelle Huneven for her novel Blame (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Hilary Mantel for her novel Wolf Hall (Holt), which took the Booker Prize last year
Jayne Anne Phillips for her novel Lark and Termite (Knopf)

In autobiography, the finalists are:
Diana Athill for Somewhere Towards the End (Norton)
Debra Gwartney for Live Through This: A Mother's Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Mary Karr for Lit (Harper)
Kati Marton for Enemies of the People: My Family's Journey to America (Simon & Schuster)
Edmund White for City Boy (Bloomsbury)

The shortlisted authors will give a reading in New York City on March 10. They'll be joined by finalists in biography, criticism, and general nonfiction, a group that includes William T. Vollman, nominated for his nonfiction book Imperial (Viking); David Hajdu, a finalist in criticism for Heroes and Villains: Essays on Music, Movies, Comics, and Culture (Da Capo Press); and Martha A. Sandweiss, nominated in biography for Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Penguin Press). The winners will be announced on March 11.

Fiction writer Eugene Cross is the recipient of the third annual Dzanc Prize, given by Dzanc Books to facilitate the completion of a novel or story collection and support a writer in realizing plans to serve his community. Cross, whose submission rose to the top of over one hundred entries, will receive half of his five-thousand-dollar prize next month and the other half once he has completed his proposed service project.

In his hometown of Erie, Pennsylvania, Cross plans to run three four-month creative workshops for refugees from Nepal, Sudan, and Bhutan who are learning English as a second language. He also anticipates completing a short story collection titled "Fires of Our Choosing."

"Eugene's writing has that perfect blend of modernism and classic storytelling, is at once humorous and sexy, intelligent and provocative, and is at the same time composed and controlled," Dzanc publisher Steven Gillis said in a press release. "We were also very much moved by Eugene's service program. With all that is going on in the world, and in particular as the devastation in Haiti is front page news, we found Eugene's desire to work with refugees in the telling of their stories a wonderful and timely idea." 

Cross, an MFA alum from the University of Pittsburgh, teaches English and creative writing at Penn State in Erie. His stories have appeared in Hobart, Narrative Magazine, the Pinch, and Third Coast, among other journals.

The Library of Congress announced today that U.S. poet laureate Kay Ryan has selected two emerging poets as recipients of the thirteenth annual Witter Bynner Fellowships. Jill McDonough and Atsuro Riley will each be awarded $7,500 and will both give a reading next month in Washington, D.C.

McDonough, who hails from Boston, and Riley, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, will each also organize readings in their respective hometowns as part of the fellowship. The two poets—both Pushcart Prize winners who have seen their work published in established journals such as Poetry and Threepenny Review—are each authors of a single collection. McDonough's debut, Habeas Corpus (Salt Publishing, 2008), is a sonnet series on the theme of real-life executions whose "histories of injectings, hangings, and burnings wind up not sensational but mysterious," Ryan says. In April, the University of Chicago Press will release Riley's first book, Romey's Order—interlocking poems evocative of the poet's South Carolina Lowcountry heritage that, according to Ryan, "play equally over the skin and the mind."

There is no application process for the fellowships, which are awarded using funds from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry to support poets in their practice. Previous winners, selected each year by the current poet laureate, are:
1998 Carol Muske-Dukes and Carl Phillips
1999 David Gewanter, Heather McHugh, and Campbell McGrath
2000 Naomi Shihab Nye and Joshua Weiner (all seven chosen by Robert Pinsky)
2001 Tory Dent and Nick Flynn (chosen by Stanley Kunitz)
2002 George Bilgere and Katia Kapovich
2003 Major Jackson and Rebecca Wee (all four chosen by Billy Collins)
2004 Dana Levin and Spencer Reece (chosen by Louise Glück)
2005 Claudia Emerson and Martin Walls
2006 Joseph Stroud and Connie Wanek (all four chosen by Ted Kooser)
2007 Laurie Lamon and David Tucker (chosen by Donald Hall)
2008 Matthew Thorburn and Monica Youn (chosen by Charles Simic)
2009 Christina Davis and Mary Szybist (chosen by Kay Ryan)

For information about the free, public reading in Washington, D.C., which will take place at the library's James Madison Building at 6:45 PM on February 18, visit the Library of Congress Web site.