Brad Parks has won the Nero Award for Faces of the Gone (Minotaur), his debut mystery. Named for Nero Wolfe, the protagonist in some 72 Rex Stout novels and novellas, the award recognizes the best American mystery of the year and is given by the Wolfe Pack, a literary society.
In October Parks also won the Shamus Award for Faces of the Gone, making him the first person to win both awards for the same book in the combined 60-year history of the awards. Parks's next book in the series starring investigative reporter Carter Ross, Eyes of the Innocent, will be released in February.
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Jennifer Perrine has won the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize for In the Human Zoo, which, under the terms of the $1,000 award, will be published by the University of Utah Press in the spring. The press sponsors the prize with the university's English department. The prize honors the late poet and teacher.
Judge Anne Winters, professor emerita of poetry at the University of Illinois at Chicago, commented: "Jennifer Perrine's poems, saturated in taut emotion and even in overt violence, are yet cooled, disciplined, by rigorous rendering, carefully evoked locations and descriptions. Jennifer Perrine is a deeply committed poet, intelligent, intense and perceptive of the minutiae of inner and outer human trauma."
Perrine's first book of poetry, The Body Is No Machine, was published by New Issues and won the 2008 Devil's Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry. She teaches creative writing and gender studies at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.