Books :: Fall 2016 Book Award Winners

The fall season seems to be flying by, so let’s hit pause to look back at the award-winning books published in the past few months.

Back in September, Truman State University Press published Daughter, Daedalus by Alison D. Moncrief Bromage, winner of the 2016 T. S. Eliot Prize Winner. Jennifer Clement, contest judge, calls the collection “both original and very often masterful,” with an “elevated High Church intention [ . . . ] that T. S. Eliot would have recognized.” Copies are available digitally and in print at the press’s website.

Also published in September was the winner of Southeast Missouri State University Press’s Nilsen Prize for a First Novel: Rules for Lying by Anne Corbitt. Rules for Lying is a timely novel that explores the accusations and characters involved in an alleged rape, and how the families and the town they live in react, incriminate, and take sides. More information is available at the publisher’s website.

Moving on to October, Allegra Hyde’s Of This New World, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, was released. Judge Bennet Simms calls it “an ambitious and memorable debut.” In twelve stories, Hyde writes with a mix of lyricism humor, and masterful detail. Check out the University of Iowa Press website for more information.

And finally, Josh Rathkamp won the 2016 Georgetown Review Press Poetry Manuscript Contest with his collection A Storm to Close the Door. Terrance Hayes calls the collection stunning with poems that “are often quick-witted and charming, but they never shy away from their meditations and quotidian American blues.” SPD has A Storm to Close the Door available for purchase.