Shortlists have been announced for the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. Winners will be announced on January 29 during LibLearnX. The shortlisted titles:
Fiction:
Greenland by David Santos Donaldson (Amistad)
Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty (Tin House)
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka (Knopf)
Nonfiction:
Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson (Pantheon Books)
An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden World around Us by Ed Yong (Random House)
Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross (Norton)
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The Library of Congress is awarding the $10,000 2022 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry to former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove for lifetime achievement and to Heid E. Erdrich for her poetry collection Little Big Bully (Penguin Books). The poets will receive their honors and read selections from their work on Thursday, December 8, at 7 p.m. at the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building.
The Bobbitt jury called Dove's latest poetry collection, Playlist from the Apocalypse: Poems, "quintessential Rita Dove: ethical and lyrical, moving in and out of the whirlwind that is history, playful in her use of form--sonnets, odes, addresses, invocations, aubades--and generous in her gathering of different voices and tribes to her pages."
The Bobbitt jury said that Heid E. Erdrich "writes across the breadth of the U.S.'s collective history with Indigenous peoples using historical terminology that reaches into the heart of tribal sovereign existence. Yet there is the underlying awareness that Indigenous nations maintain a unique history and have tribal narratives that shape their lives. Her poems are lyrical, visual and, at times, achingly personal."
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Biography International Organization awarded its 2022 Editorial Excellence Award to Gerald Howard, the editor who retired in 2020 as executive editor and v-p of Doubleday Books after almost 50 years in publishing.
Howard began his career in 1972 as a copywriter for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and while moving from Viking Penguin to Norton to Doubleday, he acquired and published biographies on a range of subjects, from Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Frank Sinatra, Maurice Sendak, Luciano Pavarotti and Joan of Arc, to lesser-known figures such as Iceberg Slim, Lester Bangs, Harold Hayes, and homicide detective Dave Carbone. Howard has also been a major editor of fiction, having received the 2009 Maxwell Perkins Award, and he has worked with authors such as Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, A.M. Homes, David Foster Wallace, and Hanya Yanagihara. His essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Tin House, American Scholar, London Review of Books, n+1, Salon, and other publications. BIO added that he is currently writing a biography of legendary editor Malcolm Cowley for Penguin Press that, to the amusement of some colleagues, is overdue.