The National Book Foundation has revealed its Five Under Thirty-Five honorees for 2009, all of whom are recognized for debut books. The five writers, chosen as they have been since the Five Under Thirty-Five program began in 2006 by former National Book Award (NBA) winners and finalists, will be celebrated by their nominators and a host of lit lovers at a celebration in New York City kicking off National Book Awards week later this fall.

The honorees are:
Ceridwen Dovey for her novel Blood Kin (Viking, 2008), selected by Rachel Kushner, 2008 NBA Fiction Finalist for Telex from Cuba (Scribner, 2008)

C. E. Morgan for her novel All the Living (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), selected by Christine Schutt, 2004 NBA Fiction Finalist for Florida (TriQuarterly Books, 2004)

Lydia Peelle for her novel Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (HarperCollins, 2009), selected by Salvatore Scibona, 2008 NBA Fiction Finalist for The End (Graywolf Press, 2008)

Karen Russell for her story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves  (Vintage, 2006), selected by Dan Chaon, 2001 NBA Fiction Finalist for Among the Missing (Ballantine Books, 2001)

Josh Weil for his novella collection The New Valley (Grove Press, 2009), selected by Lily Tuck, 2004 NBA Fiction Winner for The News from Paraguay (HarperCollins, 2004)

The event celebrating the five will take place on November 16 at Brooklyn's PowerHouse Arena, a popular venue for literary events and home to the art book publisher PowerHouse Books. The honorees will read from their works at the party, emceed by New York City punk rocker and novelist Richard Hell. Brooklyn author Jonathan Lethem will serve as the evening's DJ.

The National Book Awards, now in their sixtieth year, will be announced the following Wednesday, November 18, at the foundation's annual dinner in New York City.

Following an impressive batch of submissions to its inaugural short story collection contest last year, Dzanc Books has announced that it will run a second wave of the competition this fall. The winning fiction writer will receive one thousand dollars and publication of his or her book by the Michigan-based nonprofit literary press, with a release date in spring or summer of 2012.

The deadline for manuscript entries, which should be sent via e-mail, is December 31. There is an entry fee of twenty dollars; payment information is available on the press's Web site.

Last year's winner was David Galef for My Date With Neanderthal Woman, slated for publication in November 2011. His book will join a titles lineup that includes works by Laura van den Berg, whose debut story collection, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, was recently named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, as well as Terese Svoboda, Roy Kesey, and the authors of Black Lawrence Press and OV Books, Dzanc's imprints. 

The press also publishes Monkeybicycle, a biannual lit mag in print whose online incarnation is updated twice a week.

Poet Linda Gregg of New York City received high honors from the Academy of American Poets today as winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Fellow poets Dorianne Laux, J. D. McClatchy, and James Richardson selected her latest collection, All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2008) for the twenty-five-thousand-dollar award, given for a collection published in the previous year.

The book, Gregg's eighth, also won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America (PSA) in March. Gregg's poetry has been recognized by PEN American Center, with the PEN/Voelcker Award, and Poets & Writers, Inc., with the Jackson Poetry Prize, and she has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Gregg, who has said of her work, "The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human," receives from the Academy an award named for a writer and activist who promoted the sacredness of the world in her own right: Lenore Marshall helped form the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, an organization that helped pass the partial nuclear test ban treaty of 1963. The New Hope Foundation created the prize in her memory in 1975.

The list of past winners—a group that includes John Ashbery, Wanda Coleman, Stanley Kunitz, and Alice Notley—is posted on the Academy's Web site.

Gregg reads at the Jackson Poetry Prize ceremony in May:

After bowing out of consideration for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, storied story writer Alice Munro has been named one of five finalists for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. Her collection Too Much Happiness (McClelland and Stewart) is the fourth of her books to be nominated for the award, which she won in 2004 for Runaway (McClelland and Stewart). The twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize is given for a novel or short story collection by a Canadian author.

The other finalists, announced today, are:
Nicole Brossard for her novel Fences in Breathing (Coach House Books), translated by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood
Douglas Coupland for his novel Generation A (Random House Canada)
Annabel Lyon for her debut novel The Golden Mean (Random House Canada)
Andrew Steinmetz for his debut novel Eva's Threepenny Theatre (Gaspereau Press)

Descriptions of the shortlisted books—from a memoir-inspired tale of a Brechtian performer to a fictionalized story of Aristotle's tutoring a young Alexander the Great—are posted along with finalist biographies on the prize Web site. The winner will be announced on November 24.

There are only two days remaining to enter the Short Fiction Contest from Zoetrope: All-Story, the lit mag founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997. Not only will the winner receive a prize of one thousand dollars and publication on the magazine's Web site, but he or she, along with nine finalists, will also be considered for representation by a number of literary agencies. The ten top story writers will have their work reviewed by the William Morris Agency, International Creative Management, Regal Literary, the Elaine Markson Literary Agency, Inkwell Management, Sterling Lord Literistic, and the Georges Borchardt Literary Agency.

The judge this year is Yiyun Li, author of the award-winning story collection A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (Random House, 2005) and The Vagrants (Random House, 2009), which is up for the 2009 First Novel Prize from the Mercantile Library Center for Fiction. She is a contributing editor of A Public Space.

Stories of up to five thousand words can be submitted, along with a fifteen-dollar entry fee, via the journal's online submission system until 11:59 PM on Thursday, October 1.

The winner of last year's contest was Bernie McGill of Portstewart, Ireland, for "Sleepwalkers," selected by Elizabeth McCracken.