Carol Burnett won a Grammy in the Best Spoken Word Album category yesterday for her narration of the audiobook edition of In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox (Random House Audio). The work consists of behind-the-scenes stories of the Carol Burnett Show, and was also published as a Crown Archetype hardcover.
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Jean Valentine became the 50th winner of the $165,000 Bollingen Prize for Poetry, which is awarded by the Yale University Library through the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library to an American poet for the best book published during the previous two years or for lifetime achievement in poetry. The prize honors her most recent book, Shirt in Heaven (Copper Canyon Press).
The judges (Rigoberto González, Alice Quinn and Arthur Sze) said Valentine "is fearless when moving into charged territory and in her work we find mystery and surprise in abundance. Without compromising substance or sacrificing a reckoning with painful reality, inequity, and loss, there is solace and spirituality, and she radiates responsibility as a voice of clarity and compassion."
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Vievee Francis won Claremont Graduate University's $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, given annually "to a single book of poetry by a mid-career poet," for Forest Primeval (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press). POETRY magazine editor Don Share, who chaired this year's finalist judges committee, described the collection as "an intense work, dark... Dantean... dreamlike in its visions."
In addition, Phillip B. Williams won the $10,000 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, given for a first book by a "promising poetic talent," for Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books). Both writers will be honored at an awards ceremony April 20 in Los Angeles.