Last week, the nominees for the prestigious National Book Award were announced from the great state of Minnesota. Among the nominees is Minnesota author Pete Hautman, nominated for his young-adult novel “Godless (Simon & Schuster).
“The 20 finalists were announced from the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, the first time the event has taken place outside New York City,” wrote Sarah Williams in the Star Tribune. “Radio host and author Garrison Keillor, who hosted the event, said it’s a natural fit for a state that honors literature and whose children have come to expect “hard, rectangular packages under the Christmas tree that are not boxes of chocolate.”
“Keillor also will host the November 17 dinner in New York at which the winners will be announced. Each winner receives $10,000 plus a bronze statue; each finalist receives a bronze medal and a $1,000 cash award.” The nominees include:
Young People’s Literature
Deb Caletti, Honey, Baby, Sweetheart (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Pete Hautman, Godless (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
Laban Carrick Hill, Harlem Stomp!: A Cultural History of the Harlem Renaissance (Megan Tingley Books/Little, Brown & Company)
Shelia P. Moses, The Legend of Buddy Bush (Margaret K. McElderry Books/Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division)
Julie Anne Peters, Luna: A Novel (Megan Tingley Books/Little, Brown & Company)
Nonfiction
Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (Henry Holt & Company, LLC)
David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (Oxford University Press)
Jennifer Gonnerman, Life on the Outside: The Prison Odyssey of Elaine Bartlett
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (W.W. Norton & Company)
The 9/11 Commission, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States-Authorized Edition (W.W. Norton & Company)
Poetry
William Heyen, Shoah Train (Etruscan Press)
Donald Justice, Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf)
Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Cole Swensen, Goest (Alice James Books)
Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan University Press)
Fiction
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Madeleine is Sleeping (Harcourt, Inc.)
Christine Schutt, Florida (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
Joan Silber, Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories (W.W. Norton & Company)
Lily Tuck, The News from Paraguay (HarperCollinsPublishers)
Kate Walbert, Our Kind: A Novel in Stories (Scribner)
The Judges for the 2004 National Book Awards:
Fiction panel: Rick Moody (chair), Linda Hogan, Randall Kenan, Stewart O’Nan, and Susan Straight.
Nonfiction panel: Diane Wood Middlebrook (chair), Douglas Brinkley, Ted Conover, Thadious Davis, and Katherine Newman.
Young People’s Literature panel: Lois Ruby (chair), James Haskins, Marie G. Lee, Phoebe Stone, and Neil Waldman.
Poetry panel: Michael Waters (chair), Lynn Emanuel, James Galvin, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Al Young.
