SALON

Thursday, Nov 17, 2011 8:10 AM UTC

Book Awards honor the 99 Percent

Jesmyn Ward's "Salvage the Bones" wins fiction prize at ceremony held blocks from Occupy Wall Street

By

Topics: National Book Awards,

NEW YORK (AP) — The National Book Awards ceremony, held just blocks from the Occupy Wall Street protests, was a gilded tribute to the 99 percent.

Stories of resilience in the face of poverty, displacement and disappearance were awarded Wednesday night as hundreds of writers, editors, publishers and other industry officials gathered under the 70-foot ceilings of the luxury venue Cipriani Wall Street.

“I thought I should point out, since nobody else has,” said poet Ann Lauterbach, who introduced honorary winner John Ashbery, “that we are occupying Wall Street.”

Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” a bleak but determined novel about a black community in Mississippi devastated by Hurricane Katrina, won the fiction prize. Ward’s acceptance, the culmination of a night of emotional speeches and tributes to those who had been silenced, noted that the death of her younger brother had inspired her to become a writer. She realized that life was a “feeble, unpredictable thing,” but that books were a testament of strength before a punishing world.

“I wanted to write about the experiences of the poor and the black and the rural people of the South,” said Ward, whose brother was hit by a drunk driver the year she graduated from college. Earlier in the week, she told The Associated Press that writing was a way to “ease the looming fact of death.”

Ward’s novel, picked over such better known works as Tea Obreht’s “The Tiger’s Wife,” was based partly on first-hand experience. She was with her family in Mississippi when Katrina hit. They fled the house, fearful of drowning in their own attic.

“We went out into the storm, sheltered in our cars for hours, were denied shelter by a white family who told us we could sit outside in their field but couldn’t shelter in their house, and then made our way to an intersection where another family, again white, took us in,” she said. “To say the least, it was traumatic.”

Stephen Greenblatt’s “The Swerve,” a dramatic account of the Renaissance era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius, won for nonfiction Wednesday. The poetry prize went to Nikki Finney’s “Head Off & Split,” summation of African-American history from slavery to Katrina, while Thanhhai Lai’s “Inside Out & Back Again,” the story of a Vietnamese family in Alabama, won for young people’s literature at a time when the state is reconsidering sweeping anti-immigration laws that went into effect in September.

Winners each receive $10,000.

Actor-author John Lithgow hosted the ceremony, declaring himself humbled before the “great thoughts,” ”quicksilver wit” and “eloquent locution” among the attendees. After Finney’s remarks, a compressed and impassioned review of the injustices and triumphs set to verse in her book that had audience members standing and cheering, he expressed pity for the winners who had to follow. Greenblatt, tearful in victory, noted the miracle of words, how an ancient poet such as Lucretius could matter so greatly centuries later.

“My book is about the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space and time and distance, to have someone long dead in the room with you, speaking in your ear,” said Greenblatt, a Harvard professor also known for his Shakespeare biography “Will in the World.”

Honorary prizes were given to Florida-based bookseller Mitch Kaplan, who looked back warmly on a 30-year career/calling in a business he found more fulfilling than law school, and to Ashbery, a highly praised poet with an acknowledged reputation for an inaccessible style, who called writing a “pleasure I can almost taste.” In a self-deprecating speech, the 84-year-old Ashbery confided that even intelligent people find what he writes “makes no sense” and “near root canal” as an experience to read.

“I never meant for it to be (difficult),” he said. “I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves over to something that may change us.”

The National Books Awards are chosen by separate panels of writers for each category. Judges looked through 1,223 books in all. This year’s prizes were born in controversy, after the nominees were first announced weeks ago. The list for young people’s literature initially included “Shine,” by the popular author Lauren Myracle. But the National Book Foundation, which sponsors the awards, quickly acknowledged that “Shine” had been inadvertently chosen over Franny Billingsley’s “Chime.” Nominees are read over the phone by the judging committee to the foundation and one title was mistaken for the other. In an embarrassing see-saw of decisions, Myracle was removed, reinstated, then pushed into withdrawing.

Young people’s judge Mark Aronson joked about the error Wednesday, noting how a misheard phone call in Game 5 of the World Series from the St. Louis Cardinals’ dugout to the team’s bullpen led to the wrong pitcher on the mound at a crucial moment and to the Cardinals’ defeat by the Texas Rangers.

But St. Louis went on to win the series, Aronson added, and so, too, the awards were destined to end in triumph.

More Hillel Italie.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Paul Krugman’s right: Austerity kills. "In an economy where we’re all in the same boat, one person’s spending is another person’s income. So when the government cuts spending, it reduces people’s income, leading to less business, more unemployment, and a vicious spiral of slowing down the economy."
311 points312 points | 266 comments
vote
FBI reportedly joins Bachmann campaign finance probe
255 points256 points | 22 comments
vote
Jon Karl makes things worse: He regrets “inaccurate” Benghazi email but says his story based on it “still entirely stands.” Really. ABC News?
220 points221 points | 31 comments
vote
Austerity Kills: Brian McArdle, a 57-year-old man who had had two strokes and could barely walk, was found "fit for work" by a government subcontractor, and had his benefits stopped. He died the next day.
102 points103 points | 11 comments
vote
“Jodorowsky’s Dune”: The sci-fi classic that never was.
81 points82 points | 16 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: So long, Sookie Stackhouse

Recommendations