National Book Award Nominations Out

The National Book Award nominations are out, and there are two people I know or have worked with who're nominees this year. In the poetry category, fellow CC Grad Fellow Terrance Hayes received a nomination for his new collection Lighthead (Viking Penguin), and a former colleague. A former colleague, C.D. Wright, was nominated in the same category for her collection, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press).

Congratulations to them and to all this year's nominees, and here's hoping that this year, the list of winners is as variegated as the rich diversity the nominees represent. (Interestingly enough, the hyper-praised Freedom, Jonathan Franzen's newest novel, selected by Oprah Winfrey for her Book Club, did not make the list, though I can foresee it rising to the top of the US's other two major literary prize competitions, the National Book Critics Circle Award (which has been internationalized) and the Pulitzer Prize.

The complete nomination list is:

FICTION
Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)
Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)
Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)
Lionel Shriver, So Much for That (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

NONFICTION
Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
(Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group)
John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq (W.W. Norton & Co/The New Press )
Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday)

POETRY
Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)
Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)
James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)
C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)
Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown & Co.)
Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird (Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group)
Laura McNeal, Dark Water (Alfred A. Knopf)
Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)