Announcing the 2014 Winners of the National Poetry Series Awards

The National Poetry Series and the University of Georgia Press is pleased to announce the results of the 2014 open competition. Congratulations to all!

The winners are:

Monograph by Simeon Berry of Somerville, Massachusetts, chosen by Denise Duhamel, to be published by University of Georgia Press.

Let's Let That Are Not Yet Inferno by Ed Pavlić of Athens, Georgia, chosen by John Keene, to be published by Fence Books. 

The Regret Histories by Joshua Poteat of Richmond, Virginia, chosen by Campbell McGrath, to be published by HarperCollins.

Double Jinx by Nancy Reddy of Madison, Wisconsin, chosen by Alex Lemon, to be published by Milkweed Editions.

Viability by Sarah Vap of Venice, California, chosen by Mary Jo Bang, to be published by Penguin Books.

The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to ensure the publication of poetry books annually through participating publishers. More than 160 books have been awarded since the series’ inception. Publication is funded by the Lannan Foundation, Stephen Graham, the Joyce & Seward Johnson Foundation, Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds, and the Poetry Foundation.

"Monograph is one poet's primary research on all things love--the erotic, the domestic, love's glory, and its accompanying rage. Simeon Berry's voice is irresistibly authentic, even at its most crafty. . . . 'There are things I've done to make the story better . . . the girl with the skull and crossbones hearing aid. . . .' This poet writes what everyone else (or, at least, many of us) are thinking regarding the morality of memoir. 'Everything you are talking about are open secrets. She wants you to feel like you're handing over the nuclear launch codes or something.' Smart and also wise, Berry's poems are stripped bare of ornamentation and read like columns of pure light."—Denise Duhamel

Simeon Berry has been an associate editor for Ploughshares and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant and a Career Chapter Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters. His work has appeared in Crazyhorse, AGNI, Colorado Review, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, the Iowa Review, American Letters & Commentary, and many other journals. His first book, Ampersand Revisited, also won the National Poetry Series (Fence Books) in 2013. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

For more information, please contact:

The Coordinator 

The National Poetry Series 

57 Mountain Avenue 

Princeton, NJ 08540 

Phone: 609.430.0999 Fax: 609.430.9933 

Announcing the Winner of the 2014 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction

We are pleased to announce the winner of the 2014 Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction. Congratulations to Sarah Einstein, whose winning submission Mot: A Memoir will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2015.

Einstein is a PhD candidate in creative nonfiction at Ohio University. Her work has appeared in journals such as Ninth Letter, PANK, and Fringe and has been awarded a Pushcart Prize. She is also the managing editor of Brevity.

Last year’s winner, Study in Perfect by Sarah Gorham, will be published by UGA Press on September 15, 2014.

"Mot, A Memoir is a stirring work of self-discovery that manages to be both profoundly vulnerable and emotionally ferreous, as the compelling narrator accounts her puzzling, almost compulsive empathy for Mot, a homeless schizophrenic man she befriends through a shelter program. The language is frank, often austere, even haunting, and the author’s willingness to confront the proliferating uncertainties of her own life gradually attains a brave literary grace. I was delighted by how, amidst the austerity that is her métier, she can suddenly take poetic flight. Speaking of the sight of a row of abandoned cars, she writes, 'Like the cattle skulls in cowboy movies, they mark the journeys of people who’ve tried, and failed, the same road we’re traveling.'” —John Phillip Santos

Announcing the Winners of the 2014 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

Congratulations to Toni Graham and Siamak Vossoughi, this year's winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction! The competition continues to be a celebrated route to publication for literary short fiction collections. UGA Press is glad to have Graham and Vossoughi carry on this tradition.

Graham’s The Suicide Club and Vossoughi’s Better Than War will be published by the University of Georgia Press and will be available in fall 2015.

Toni Graham is a native of San Francisco. Her story collection Waiting for Elvis was winner of the John Gardner Book Award from Binghamton University. Her collection The Daiquiri Girls won the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP). She is an associate professor of English/Creative Writing at Oklahoma State, where she serves as editor in chief and fiction editor for the Cimarron Review.

Flannery O’Connor series editor Nancy Zafris on Graham’s collection: “Already aliens in a strange faraway land called Oklahoma, the endearing characters in The Suicide Club are further alienated by the one event that unites their otherwise disparate group: the suicide of a loved one. In addition to marvelous language and descriptions, the author deftly employs humor not to deflect but to dig deeper into the undercurrents that our humankind try hardest to ignore even as these very undercurrents sharpen our sorrows and scrub us into the beings who stare back at us in the mirror. Often hilarious, the soaring funny asides accrue into piercing insights that begin to sear the soul. As we turn the last page, we are left better for having journeyed through a work that seeks higher ground and profundity, that seeks to unite heart and cerebrum and make sense of it all.”

Siamak Vossoughi was born in Tehran and grew up in London, Orange County, and Seattle. He graduated from the University of Washington and has lived in San Francisco since then. Along with writing, he works as a tutor and substitute teacher. Some of his writing has appeared in Faultline, Fourteen Hills, Prick of the Spindle, The Rumpus, and Washington Square. He is also the recipient of the 2013 Very Short Fiction Award from Glimmer Train. He is currently writing a novel. He is tremendously honored to have received the Flannery O'Connor Award.

Nancy Zafris on Vossoughi’s collection: “The short shorts that comprise Better Than War examine the fitful ways of assimilation and the particular loneliness of alienation, especially as they apply to Iranian immigrants. Although told from the point of view of several characters, the first-person tales dominate. What emerges is a bildungsroman mosaic constructed in pieces of language that are less idiomatic than philosophical. The puzzle-piece ruminations evoke reminders of Calvino and Kundera, American Iranian style. This is a young writer venturing into territory that will define his aesthetic style and ambitions.”

The finalists in this year’s competition are Kathy Anderson of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Oscar Cuevas of Brooklyn, New York; Emily Doak of Greencastle, Indiana; Louise Jarvis Flynn of Durham, North Carolina; Dana Fitz Gale of Missoula, Montana; Debbie Graber of Studio City, California; Becky Hagenston of Starkville, Mississippi; Liz Windhorst Harmer of Riverside, California; Christopher McCann of Bainbridge Island, Washington; and Jennifer Anne Moses of Montclair, New Jersey.

Congratulations to all participants and thank you for creating compelling short fiction. The award-winning books selected in last year's competition, Faulty Predictions by Karin Lin-Greenberg and Bright Shards of Someplace Else by Monica McFawn, will be published on September 15, 2014.

Short Takes

The latest Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winners, Karin Lin-Greenberg's FAULTY PREDICTIONS and Monica McFawn's BRIGHT SHARDS OF SOMEPLACE ELSE receive positive reviews in the September 1 and 15 issues (respectively) of Booklist. FAULTY PREDICTIONS is "luminous" and "masterful," and the stories in BRIGHT SHARDS OF SOMEPLACE ELSE "shine."

In her guest column for the Saporta Report, Laura McCarty, vice president of the Georgia Humanities Council, discusses Glenn T. Eskew's recent book, JOHNNY MERCER. JOHNNY MERCER "explores the life and global legacy of Mercer—one of the most prolific, successful, and popular songwriters of the 20th century."

In the September/October 2014 issue of Poets & Writers, the first line of Sarah Gorham's STUDY IN PERFECT is included in the Page One round-up of new and noteworthy books.

Congratulations to Susan Puckett and Charles Seabrook! Their books (EAT DRINK DELTA and THE WORLD OF THE SALT MARSH) made this year's Books All Georgians Should Read list. The Georgia Center for the Book selected the works of 22 prize-winning authors and illustrators with Georgia connections for the 2014 list.The public ceremony was held on Thursday, August 21 at the Decatur Library in Decatur, GA.

Don't forget: the Decatur Book Festival is happening this weekend! Make sure to stop by our booth and check out our specials! More information about our presence at the Decatur Book Festival is here.