2006

Novels about the blue-collar world are rare: Seldom does someone near the cellar of society escape to tell the tale. Eric Miles Williamson joined the Laborers Union when he graduated from high school in 1979 and spent seven years as a gunite construction worker, witnessing atrocities that don't make the evening news. Two-Up is Williamson's fictional account of a journey through the nightmare of the American labor inferno.

The author unfolds the story of his life in and out of the academy: his adventures and misadventures as son and husband and father; his forays as a hunter and his struggles with dogs and other creatures; his vocation as teacher and writer; his brushes with death as crises in his health occur; his meditations on our common mortality. Of particular interest now are the vivid accounts describing hurricanes in and around New Orleans during the late 1940s and early 50s.

All in all this dazzling work of reminiscence and reflection enriches and enhances our understanding of life's pitfalls and possibilities. What more can any reader ask of an author?

Come Rain, Come Shine dazzles with a quiet brilliance all its own, a luster born of simple things, with stirring poems of desire, familial love and fatherhood, and with real life places and encounters, at once exotic and familiar. These lyric poems are rich with a sense of place and narrative and evoke both family story and Louisiana in all their rain and shine." -Diane Thiel

Archibald Sims, Charleston's premier detective, has a mansion on The Battery and a $1-a-year job as a homicide detective. What starts as a routine investigation quickly sends him on the trail of a series of bizarre murders in the Lowcountry. At the heart of the case is a cunning, perverse loner who will stop at nothing in his quest for the ultimate revenge. The bodies are piling up fast, and this investigation will test Sims like no other. As he races to stop the killer, he discovers a horrible truth-his girlfriend and his young son are targets too.

This is the story of the Gustavas A. Wynne family and the home Mr. Wynne built for his bride in Huntsville, Texas, in 1883. During their lifetime and through the generations since, the Wynne family has occupied a prominent place in the economic, religious and social life of the community and created an evolution of the original honeymoon cottage into the classical home of today. It is also the story of the magnanimous gift of the home to the city in 1998 and the reconstruction and adaptive reuse of the structure as a community arts center. Photographs both old and new document the history and open the doors to a home and to a lifestyle of generous contribution to the city and the region.

Winner of the 2005 Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize

The poems in The Downstairs Dance Floor are inhabited by family survivors-a father and mother widowed early, who in a second marriage made the best of their losses; the only child of that marriage; a distant uncle who devoted his life to music; a widowed stepfather in his declining years; others who, when the time comes, look for meaning in living alone. The other main character in this collection is, of course, Death. Using old family photos, letters, and anecdotes from friends and family members, the poet tries to imagine the unsatisfied dreams of those no longer able to tell their own stories.

Winner of the 2005 X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize

Landscape with Silos, with its dual reference to North Dakota farmlands and the unseen missile silos beneath them, is an exercise in how submerged truth can be revealed when a poet's talent for imagination and a slanted attention are brought to bear on what's ordinarily represented as the whole story.

Winner of the 2005 Clay Reynolds Novella Prize

"Suzanne Freeman's light-hearted look at the foibles of modern society offers a brittle examination of American consumerism's mad dash toward manufactured solutions to everyday problems. Her all- encompassing survey of middle-class values skewers short-sighted science, corporate greed, and the mania to find both health and happiness in marketed products. Writing in the best tradition of modern satire, Freeman's story evokes shades of Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Thomas Berger, and maybe just a dash of Fannie Flagg and Dave Barry. This is a witty work, but with a sobering point about the American way of acceptance."-Clay Reynolds, Final Judge

Winner of the 2005 George Garrett Fiction Prize.

If one aspect of their consciousness characterizes the Spanish, it is the prevailing philosophy that life is worth what it does to you. Fiestas is a collection of short stories about modern Spain, beginning with a tale of true love versus romance in the years just before the Spanish Civil War of 1936. The collection takes the reader into the Civil War and Spain's darkest and most wretched times and continues through the twentieth century, with stories of ordinary Spaniards living the fiestas of their lives-the loves, deaths, miseries, and minor triumphs of a people determined to make the most of whatever life can throw at them.