2001

Winner of the 2000 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize

Her poems witness both the horrific the loss of a child, the greed of the impoverished, the motives behind child prostitution and common pleasures "so dense they sedate you.

Sam, a reclusive underachiever with a long track record of failed marriages and aspirations, must face, in one short spurt of time, the imminent prospects of middle age, professional outplacement, and unwanted responsibilities toward both his father and his son, two men whom he has spent long and careful effort to distance himself from.

A Place Apart is at once witty and wry and beautiful, filled with vivid description and sharp dialogue. It hits solidly on dilemmas faced daily by many people in many places by telling a compelling story of one man in one place. It is a finely honed novel that will continue to sing a haunting, recognizable song long after the reader has finished the last page.

Larry D. Thomas retired from a career in adult criminal justice with the Harris County, Texas, Community Supervision and Corrections Department in 1998. Book-length manuscripts of Thomas's poetry were selected as finalists in the 1993 and 1997 Southern and Southwestern Poets Breakthrough Series competitions sponsored by Texas Review Press and the Summer 2000 Pecan Grove Press national chapbook competition.

When Don Reid published Eyewitness in 1973, the chronicle of his conversion from a supporter of the death penalty to an ardent opponent, the book was an immediate sensation. Perhaps never before in the history of the American penal system has a man witnessed more electrocutions than Reid, who as Associated Press and Huntsville Item representative watched 189 men die in 'Old Sparky,' as the electric chair in the Texas Department of Corrections' death chamber was not so affectionately called. This book is a powerful personal account of Reid's conversations with many of the very men he later watched receive the eighteen hundred volts of electricity from generators reserved for electrocutions and his later, almost evangelical efforts to defend the men on Death Row from a similar fate.