Finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards

If you are looking for new reading recommendations, you might start with this year's finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature from the National Book Foundation.

The five finalists in each category were selected by a panel of judges; the winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on November 20. Each winner will receive $10,000 as well as a bronze medal and a statue; each finalist will receive $1,000 and a bronze medal. Winners and finalists in the translated literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator.

Five of the twenty-five finalists are debuts, and ten of the honored books are published by independent or university presses.

POETRY

Anne Carson - Wrong Norma (New Directions)

Fady Joudah - [...] (Milkweed Editions)

m.s. RedCherries - mother (Penguin Books)

Diane Seuss - Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha - Something About Living (University of Akron Press)

FICTION

’Pemi Aguda for Ghostroots (Norton)

Kaveh Akbar for Martyr! (Knopf)

Percival Everett for James (Doubleday)

Miranda July for All Fours (Riverhead Books)

Hisham Matar for My Friends (Random House)

NONFICTION

Jason De León for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books)

Eliza Griswold for Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Kate Manne for Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown)

Salman Rushdie for Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House)

Deborah Jackson Taffa for Whiskey Tender (Harper)

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Bothayna Al-Essa for The Book Censor’s Library (Restless Books), translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain

Linnea Axelsson for Ædnan (Knopf), translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Fiston Mwanza Mujila for The Villain's Dance (Deep Vellum), translated from the French by Roland Glasser

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ for Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

Samar Yazbek for Where the Wind Calls Home (World Editions) translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

Violet Duncan for Buffalo Dreamer (Nancy Paulsen Books)

Josh Galarza for The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky (Henry Holt)

Erin Entrada Kelly for The First State of Being (Greenwillow Books)

Shifa Saltagi Safadi for Kareem Between (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers)

Angela Shanté for The Unboxing of a Black Girl (Page Street Publishing)

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Small Presses - Exit 13 and Lips

Small presses and small publications are vital to the poetry ecosystem because they foster creativity, diversity, and community, enriching the literary landscape with voices and works that might otherwise go unheard. Small presses often take chances on new and emerging poets who may not yet have a substantial following or recognition. This helps bring fresh, diverse voices to the forefront.

Unlike larger publishers, which may prioritize commercial viability, small presses often focus on the artistic and literary quality of the work. This allows for more experimental, avant-garde, and niche poetry to be published.

Small presses tend to be more closely connected with local and literary communities. They often organize readings, workshops, and events that foster a sense of community among poets and readers.

Such is the case with two local poetry journals with which I have personal connections and that I would recommend poets consider for their poetry.

One is  Exit 13 Magazine, a travelogue in poetry, a reflection and a chronicle of the people and places encountered along the way. Since 1988, the emphasis has been on geography, travel, and the fertile ground of the imagination. 

The editor, Tom Plante, asks contributors to be patient as this is "a one-man operation with technical help from my wife and daughter. The magazine also accepts photos of “Exit 13” road signs which act as illustrations. There is no fee, though donations are welcome and you may subscribe at $15. Payment is one copy of the issue if a poem or photo is used. They are open to reading poems about your travels, adventures, and geographic experiences. The reading period is July through January and the annual issue comes out in late summer.  See www.facebook.com/Exit13Magazine for info

Another annual poetry magazine is Lips. Founded in 1981 by poet Laura Boss, Lips poetry journal has entered its fifth decade of publication. Laura served as its editor until her passing in April 2021. It is now financially supported by the Laura Boss Poetry Foundation. 

Lips has published narrative poems by Robert Bly, Allen Ginsberg, Ruth Stone, David Ignatow, Marge Piercy, Michael Benedikt, Nicholas Christopher, Anne Waldman, Ishmael Reed, Gregory Corso, Lyn Lifshin, Ted Berrigan, Paul Hoover, Jana Harris, Toi Derricotte, Joseph Bruchac, Alice Notley, Hal Sirowitz, Theodore Weiss, Alicia Ostriker, Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Stanley H. Barkan, Michael Weaver, Molly Peacock, and Richard Kostelanetz.

Submissions are open now through November 30. No fee.  See laurabosspoetryfoundation.org

By publishing works that may not fit mainstream trends, small presses contribute to preserving and promoting diverse cultural and literary traditions.

Editors at small presses typically have greater freedom to champion works they are passionate about, without the pressure of market demands. This can lead to a more personalized and dedicated approach to publishing poetry. 

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Cartoonish

"Betty Boop's Bebop" by Barbara Hamby (from All-Night Lingo Tango) is one of about a dozen poems of hers that I heard over the years of listening to The Writer's Almanac program. She imagines the cartoon character Betty Boop telling us how she is not who we think she is. She has read Rilke! This Betty reminds me of Jessica Rabbit (from the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) who sexily cooed "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way."

Our September call for Submissions is a simple one. Tell us the so-far-untold story of a cartoon character. It's a character we know pretty well on the screen or paper, but we never got the full story. We never heard from the character in a way that was not controlled by writers and artists.

Submission Deadline: September 30, 2024 for issue #327

Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times.
She is the author of seven poetry collections including Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), and Babel (2004). Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire (1999) won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry. Her first book, Delirium (1995), won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Barbara edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby.
She teaches at Florida State University where she is a Distinguished University Scholar.
"Betty Boop's Bebop" is from her collection All-Night Lingo Tango (2009, University of Pittsburgh Press) Her website is barbarahamby.com

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org

Southey and the Three Bears

I saw a reference to poet Robert Southey who had been one of the English Poet Laureates. I had never heard of him but that doesn’t mean much to his fame. Though I read a lot more poetry than the average person, all I have to do is look at the table of contents of the Norton anthology of poetry on my shelf to realize how many poets I have not read and didn’t even know were poets.

Robert Southey was born in Bristol, England in 1774 and is considered one of the leading poets of his day, along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. He belonged to the so-called Lake School of English Romantic poetry. Today his poetry is pretty much forgotten.

But we do do know one short children's story he published anonymously called "The Story of the Three Bears" (1837). 

He said his uncle had told him the story as a child. It was about an old woman who invades the house of three bears, tries out their porridge, their chairs, and their beds, and then jumps out the window when they come home. 

Southey's story has rather grim ending: "Out the little old woman jumped; and whether she broke her neck in the fall, or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her." 

The story has been rewritten many times by other authors and in the later more upbeat versions, the old woman becomes a little girl named "Goldilocks" who gets away unharmed from her break in to the home of the bears.

I feel bad for Robert that he is only remembered for that little story (though it has sold millions of copies over the years), so here is one of his sonnets.

            SONNET IV.

    I Praise thee not, ARISTE, that thine eye

      Knows each emotion of the soul to speak;

    That lillies with thy face might fear to vie,

      And roses can but emulate thy cheek.

    I praise thee not because thine auburn hair

      In native tresses wantons on the wind;

    Nor yet because that face, surpassing fair,

      Bespeaks the inward excellence of mind:

    'Tis that soft charm thy minstrel's heart has won,

      That mild meek goodness that perfects the rest;

      Soothing and soft it steals upon the breast,

    As the soft radiance of the setting sun,

    When varying through the purple hues of light,

    The fading orbit smiles serenely bright.

---

---

Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org