We've sent notification letters out to all our contestants, so they should have the news already. We want to say "thank you" to everyone who participated; it was another big year, and we received so much great work from so many fantastic writers that the choice was, once again, staggeringly difficult. We are proud to announce our 2009 winners:
Fiction Winner: Ted Gilley (Bennington, VT) for Bliss
Ted Gilley is a native of southwestern Virginia but has lived
in New England for 30 years. His poems and short stories have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Northwest Review, Prairie
Schooner, Rattle, The National Review, New England Review, Free Verse, and
many other magazines and anthologies. Awarded grants from the National
Endowment for the Arts/Vermont Arts Council and the McCullough Library in 2007,
Gilley won the Alehouse Press (San Francisco) national poetry competition in
2008.
Runner Up: Garth Risk Hallberg (Brooklyn, NY) for The Descent of Man: Stories
Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field
Guide to the North American Family, a novella. Other writing has appeared
in Glimmer Train, Slate, and the anthology Best New American Voices 2008. His
fiction has earned Pushcart Prize and Believer Book Award nominations and
fellowships from New York University's MFA program and the New York Foundation
for the Arts.
Poetry Winner: Shane Book (San Francisco, CA) for Fourth World
Shane Book's poetry appears in journals in the US, UK, and
Canada and in many anthologies, most recently Gathering Ground
(University of Michigan Press, 2006). He was educated at the University of Western
Ontario, the University of Victoria, New York University, the Iowa Writers’
Workshop and Stanford where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. The
recipient of scholarships to Cave Canem, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied
Poetics, and Breadloaf, his awards include a New York Times Fellowship in
Poetry, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize,
and a National Magazine Award.
Runner Up: Nicole Cooley (Glen Ridge, NJ) for Milk Dress
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans,
Louisiana. Her new book of poems, Breach,
about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, will be published by Louisiana State
University Press in March 2010. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by
LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, came out
with LSU Press in April 2004 and was chosen as one of the best poetry books of
the year by Library Journal. She also
published a novel Judy Garland, Ginger
Love, with Regan Books/Harper Collins (1998). She has received a Discovery/The Nation Award, a National Endowment
for the Arts Grant and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of
America. Her poems have appeared in The
Nation, Poetry, Missouri Review, Pleaides,
and Mississippi Review, among other
magazines. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at
Queens College—City University of New York where she directs the new MFA
program in creative writing and literary translation.
Please join us in congratulating them!
