2005

Winner of the 2005 Texas Review Fiction Prize

William Harrison is the author of eight novels—five of them set in Africa—as well as two previous volumes of short stories, essays, and major screenplays, including the original Rollerball and Mountains of the Moon. A Texan, he taught for a number of years at the University of Arkansas and still lives in Fayetteville.

Winner of the 2003 George Garrett Fiction Prize: Novel

Hoback flees to Wyoming to escape the big city violence that cost him his wife and almost turned him into a killer. Life is good in Hardwater until somebody butchers three people like deer, packs their bodies with uranium ore, and sends Hoback a poem, challenging him to stop the killing. The poet reveals an intimate knowledge of Hoback's violent past-and a perverse and terrifying interest in his son. This haunting tale of murder, betrayal, and a father's love takes place in a Wyoming uranium-mining town set in the middle of the wildest, most beautiful country south of Alaska.

Winner of the 2004 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize

Growing up in the shadow of the Chrysler Building in the Sixties, George Sabro hungered to enter the world of the rich and famous he watched on television. A series of events in the Seventies led the Times Square bartender to become a paid lover, celebrity photographer, Studio-54 semi-regular, and briefly a millionaire. Now reduced to washing dishes in a coffee shop, George is desperate to get his fifteen minutes of fame before turning fifty. Hanging up his apron, he picks up a cereal box, walks onto Sixth Avenue, and starts taking hostages.

Winner of the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Prize: Novel

Set in the small North Texas town of Burro in 1980-81, Pitching Tents is the unusual story of Vida Singer, eighty years of age, and Wayman Ezekial Scott, sixty-five. A rich, fast-paced, carefully constructed story of character, time, and place, this is a vital, comic, and touching novel of differing freedoms and loves as Vida and Wayman find a way to pitch a movable tent.

Winner of the 2004 George Garrett Fiction Prize

"The dozen short stories of An American Affair give us back a clear and accurate reflection of our own world here and now. Linked togther by geographical setting and the clash of contemporary cultures, they challenge our easy assumptions with complexity. The characters are wholly credible and fully dimensional. The stories they tell are moving and memorable. This is short fiction at its best and brightest." --George Garrett, final judge

Winner of the 2004 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

Grounded in the rural south, Myths of Electricity connects this world to the universal subjects of time, memory, and loss. "Thoughts on Human Beauty in the Y Locker Room" and "Bad Angels" delve into the flawed human condition. These poems and others in the collection explore the intersections where the seemingly disparate themes of faith and doubt, beauty and decay, as well as religion and science all meet.

We've all heard that in Texas, high school sports are a religion. What is a religion without Spirit? This book takes a look at the Spirit behind the high schools of Texas-the Mascot that represents each school's "religion." We've discovered that Texans have everything from Bulldogs to Buttons and Panthers to Punchers to bolster team morale and liven the voice of the crowd. Laugh out loud as you peruse the origins of the zanier mascots, and feel that remembered surge of pride when you meet and read about the symbols we all grew up with.

Winner of the 2004 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize

Poems about time and loss, chaos and creation. Rural and urban settings ranging from the mid-20th-century Midwest and contemporary New England to dream countrysides and surreal cities of exile. Includes twelve "little prayers," after Paul Goodman, with an epigraph from Goodman.

Written by the poet Laureate of Texas for 2004-05

Take Your Time Coming Home, by Cleatus Rattan, is a book that begins with initiation themes for the child and proceeds to initiation of the adolescent and college student and cowboy. Later, the poet tries to deal with the initiation to war. Finally, a prevailing theme is that of aging and death. The point-of-view is from the aging to the aged, then from the point-of-view of the loved-one survivor to the attitude of the dying to the survivor. Nothing morbid-just a refreshing look.