2002

Critics have compared Robert Phillips's storytelling ability in his first two collections, Land of Lost Content and Public Landing Revisited, to deMaupassant and Sherwood Anderson. All the stories are set in a mythical small town called Public Landing. Publishers Weekly said: "Phillips's vision of small town America in the '50s and '60s is simultaneously jaundiced and nostalgic . . . both funny and agonizing in its complex mingling of hope and humiliation" and found "flashes of brilliance throughout."

For the past decade Robert Phillips has continued to write stories about Public Landing. But he also has been writing a series of related stories concerning an urban protagonist with the surname of Fallick. News About People You Know shuttles between the rural DelMarVa Peninsula and New York City and its northern suburban commuter communities, alternating the bucolic with hectic. In Fallick, Phillips shows us an entirely new side to his fictional imagination.

The Roberts-Farris Cabin was built around 1840 for Allen Roberts, a stepson of one of the original Walker county settlers, Hezekiah Farris. The cabin may have been built by an intinerant builder whose distinctive square-hewn logs and half-dovetail notches are found in several other cabins and buildings in the area. Roberts, the son of Hezekiah's wife, who had settled on a nearby grant, later gave the cabin to his half-brother, who moved into the small cabin with his family.

The Farris family later relocated the cabin on three different sites, disassembling and rebuilding the hewn logs. The cabin is currently open for tourists Monday through Sunday and is used as a shop by several hand-craft groups, including the Huntsville Spinners and Weavers, the Huntsville Quilt Guild, and the Grandperson's Center.

Winner of the 2001 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

"More Space Than Anyone Can Stand presents the reader with voices and scenes so authentically American that reading these we feel a sense of privilege and celebration. Bill Notter knows the dark side of our violences, our lusts, our stupidities, but he knows as well what makes us the industrious, committed, enduring souls we are as well. These poems don't so much lift off the page as they burrow in to trouble us in the best sense, so we can't forget to question who we are as a people, and, for those of us who write, what it means to be an American poet." --Gray Jacobik, Series Judge

"No writer I've read is as good as George Garrett when it comes to showing both sides at the same instant. Fact and factoid, respect and derision, truth and falsehood, saint and sinner, art and dross, heads and tails, all show their bold faces in these stern yet cheerful pieces about literary triumphs and quasi-literary follies. There is much here for the younger writer trying to learn the way, but there is also plenty here for us to chew on who thought that we were veterans. Just wonderful." --Henry Taylor

When George Garrett wrote of Robert Winship's The Brushlanders, "Robert Winship has an abiding and powerful sense of place and, even better, compassion for and curiosity about people–the inhabitants," he might well have been writing about Flannery's Crossing, which, set also in West Texas, focuses on one Arthur Flannery, an aging cowboy, who finds himself resident in a fleabag hotel in Pecos. When Paul Markham, proprietor of the Courtney, begins losing customers because of a freight train that roars past the hotel in the early morning hours, he is helpless to stop it. Flannery saves the day.

Winner of the 2001 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize

Falling Stones is a compelling tale of the quest for spiritual meaning in early nineteenth-century rural America. Sylvester Marion Jones, born in 1836, inhabits a guilt-laden Protestant domain, saturated with ominous signs and wonders. His childhood is marked first by demonic visions and later by his young brother's mysterious disappearance, for which his father blames him. Grown up, Sylvester is drawn into marriage with a young woman suspected of witchcraft. Still a seeker of light, he finally achieves the purgation of his house–at the savage cost of acknowledging the demon in himself.

Winner of the 2001 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize

"Jorn Ake's poems delight in the raw energy that words possess when they are given the necessary space and context in which to perform their magic. We read his poems a little breathlessly, with a delighted, uneasy wonder, ushered into a world where details stand out, good and bad, with a clarity and force not soon forgotten." --David Young

Poet Laureate of the State of Texas for 2004.
Winner of the 2002 Texas Review Poetry Prize.

"Wise and savvy, Cleatus Rattan's The Border re-creates with delicacy, humor, and craftsmanship allegories from the hard-scrabble living out West Texas way. Not surprisingly, the truths out there are the same as the truths everywhere, in any time, in any heart." --Jack Myers

Winner of the 2001 George Garrett Fiction Prize

In thirteen stories written in a style so carefully crafted that they appear etched, Naton Leslie's characters take a deep breath and make the impossible choices which circumstance, and the will to love and live, make inevitable.