2011 National Book Awards

And the Winners Are...

Fiction: 

 Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward. Jesmyn grew up in DeLisle, Mississippi. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won five Hopwood awards for essays, drama, and fiction. A Stegner Fellow at Stanford, from 2008-2010, she has been named the 2010-11 Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was an Essence Magazine Book Club selection, a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for both the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. Ward says, "The stories I write are particular to my community and my people, which means the details are particular to our circumstances, but the larger story of the survivor, the savage, is essentially a universal, human one." (photo credit: wikipedia.org)

Nonfiction:

The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt. He is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University and General Editor of The Norton Shakespeare. He is the author of eleven books, including The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Shakespeare’s Freedom; Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare; Hamlet in Purgatory; Practicing New Historicism; Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World; and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. He has edited seven collections of criticism, including Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto, and is a founding coeditor of the journal Representations. His honors include the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England, the Distinguished Humanist Award from the Mellon Foundation, the Wilbur Cross Medal from the Yale University Graduate School, the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, the Erasmus Institute Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of California, Berkeley. He was president of the Modern Language Association of America and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. (photo credit: Jürgen Bauer)

Poetry:

 Head Off and Split by poet Nikky Finney. Born in 1957 in South Carolina, the daughter of a lawyer and teacher, Finney’s parents were both active in the Civil Rights movement and her childhood was shaped by the turmoil and unrest of the South in the 1960s and ‘70s. In an interview with the Oxford American, Finney noted: “I've never been far away from the human-rights struggle black people have been involved with in the South. That has been one of the backdrops of my entire life.” Finney’s engagement with political activism has also influenced her trajectory as a poet. Carefully weaving the personal and political, Finney’s poetry is known for its graceful, heartfelt synthesis of the two. Influenced by Lucille Clifton and Nikki Giovanni, Finney’s poems explore subjects ranging from the human devastation of Hurricane Katrina to Rosa Parks to the career path of Condoleezza Rice. Speaking of her latest book, the National Book Award-winning Head Off & Split (2011), Finney told the Lexington Herald-Leader: “I know the sound of the '60s and '70s. There was a lot of standing with signs, there was a lot of shouting. I wanted to be a poet who didn't shout, who said things but said them with the most beautiful attention to language…I've been really working on this for 30 years, exploring how those two paths intersect, the path where the beautifully said thing meets the really difficult-to-say thing, and that's where I think this book finds its light.”

In addition to Head Off & Split, Finney’s books of poetry include On Wings Made of Gauze (1985), Rice (1995), Heartwood (1997), and The World is Round (2003). She edited the collection Black Poets Lean South (2007), an anthology of poets associated with Cave Canem, where Finney is on faculty. Finney is also a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, a group of black Appalachian poets. She has received numerous awards for her work, including a PEN America Open Book Award and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry. Finney is the Provost’s Distinguished Service Professor of English at the University of Kentucky, and lives in Lexington. (photo: poetryfoundation.org)

Young People's Literature:

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai: "I was born in Vietnam in 1965 (The Year of the Snake), where life was good. I went to school, ate lots of snacks, was top dog in my class, and was the youngest of nine children. Yes, I know…nine. But it was war time, and people were told to have lots of babies. On April 30, 1975, North Vietnam (the Communist side) won the war, and my family and I (living in Saigon, South Vietnam) scrambled onto a navy ship and ended up in Montgomery, Alabama. Why?  Believe me, we didn't know about Alabama to choose it. But to enter the United States, refugees had to have a sponsor. The man who had the nerve to take on all of us (10 in all) lived in Alabama. Life got more complicated, with me not speaking English and never having tasted a hot dog. Add to that my looks. I was the first real-life Asian my classmates had ever seen. It took about a decade to get acclimated and to learn grammatically correct English. By then we had moved to Ft. Worth, Texas, where I went to high school. I received a degree in journalism from University of Texas, Austin.
I covered the cops beat at The Orange County Register in California for two years. Then I got this insane idea that I should quit and write fiction. After many false starts and an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, I'm publishing my first novel.

Now I'm in New York City, teaching at The New School. Life's good: running, biking, reading, writing, and chasing around a four-year-old." ~Thanhha Lai (Photo by Sloane Bosniak)