The winners of the 2017 New England Book Awards, sponsored by the New England Independent Booksellers Association and honoring books written by a New England author or set in New England, are:
Fiction: Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck (Morrow)
Nonfiction: Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel (Knopf)
Children's: Some Writer by Melissa Sweet (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Young Adult: Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzi Lee (Harper/Katherine Tegen Books)
The awards will be presented at the NEIBA Awards Banquet on September 19 in Providence, R.I.
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Travis Mossotti won the 2018 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize for his collection Narcissus Americana. Two finalists were also named: Roy Bentley, for his collection Walking with Eve in the Loved City, and P. Scott Cunningham for his collection Ya Te Veo. The winner and finalists were chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins.
The University of Arkansas Press will publish all three books, and Mossotti receives a $5,000 cash prize in addition to publication. The prize and series are named in honor of acclaimed poet Miller Williams, founding director of the press.
Collins said that "what often lures us into poems and keeps our interest is the poet's sensibility, that intangible element that arises from poet's tone, his or her verbal personality. That is what hooked me when I began to read Narcissus Americana."