Roundup: 2008 NBCC Awards Ceremony Coverage

by Eric Banks | Mar-14-2009

Ron Charles works on his material. (Photo Miriam Berkley.)

A few reactions to and coverage of the 2008 NBCC Awards Ceremony:

At GalleyCat, an interview with poetry co-winner Juan Felipe Herrera (Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems) and criticism winner Seth Lerer (Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History, From Aesop to Harry Potter). Also, the Riverside, California Press-Enterprise weighs in on Herrera. And at the Poetry Foundation, Cathy Halley at the Poetry Foundation has videos and links pertaining to Herrera and co-winner August Kleinzahler (Sleeping It Off in Rapid City). Meanwhile, the Baltimore Sun reports on its very own Ariel Sabar, winner of the 2008 award in autobiography (My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq).

Magazines, newspapers, and news sources covering the event include Publisher’s Weekly (by new board member Craig Teichner); the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (by another board newbie, Karen Long), the Houston Chronicle, Reuters, “Bloomberg (by incoming board member Laurie Muchnick), and the Christian Science Monitor. 2008 Balakian winner, who may or may not be opening for Carrot-Top next week at Zanies in Silver Springs, blogged the finalists’ reading at the Washington Post. (Appreciations of Charles’s knock ‘em dead speech accepting the Balakian Award, as well as nonfiction awardee (The Forever War) Dexter Filkins’s comments, are at Gawker and New York.) Here is what Reuters had to say, as well as the reaction overseas in the Guardian. Meanwhile, Scott McLemee writes about the last few days of the first year of his first term on the NBCC board at Quick Study.