The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College is pleased to announce the winners of the 1999 fourth annual Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes. Adria Bernardi's The Day Laid on the Altar was chosen by Andrea Barrett for the fiction award. Jill Alexander Essbaum's Heaven was chosen by Agha Shahid Ali for the poetry prize. Kevin Oderman's How Things Fit Together was chosen by Scott Russell Sanders for the creative nonfiction prize. All three books will be published in the Fall of 1999 by the Middlebury College/University Press of New England. The winning authors will also receive fellowships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in 2000.
1999 Bakeless Fiction Prize
Adria Bernardi's translations of the poetry of Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra were recently published under the title Abandoned Places (Guernica Editions of Toronto). She was the 1998 recipient of the A. E. Coppard Award for Short Fiction and the 1995 recipient of the James Fellowship for Novel awarded by the Heekin Group Foundation. She is the author of Houses with Names: The Italian Immigrants of Highwood, Illinois (University of Illinois Press). Her fiction has appeared in the Santa Monica Review, River Oak Review, in the anthology, The Voices We Carry, and will be published in a forthcoming issue of Voices in Italian Americana. She lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Andrea Barrett writes, "Spare, elegant, passionate, and brilliant, The Day Laid on the Altar, like Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower, drops us deftly into the heart of another time and place. Throughout several decades of the 16th century, in Venice, Florence, and a mountain village, the struggle to make art and life and wonder out of bleakness, plague, and hunger streams through characters ranging from an unlettered, visionary shepherd to the painter Titian, his family, and his servants. Adria Bernardi inhabits with equal grace the hearts and minds of men and women, knaves and saints and artists and beggars, and in the process has made a novel as moving and precisely detailed as any of the paintings she so beautifully describes."
1999 Bakeless Poetry Prize
Jill Alexander Essbaum was born in Southeast Texas in 1971. She received an undergraduate degree from the University of Houston (BA 1994) and continued her studies as a James A. Michener Departmental and Post-Graduate Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin where she earned an MA in 1996. At present, she is a student at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest, where her focus of study includes popular religion, feminist theology, and Christianity in 20th-century America. Ms. Essbaum's poetry has appeared or will appear in both local and national journals, including Artful Dodge, Borderlands, Rattle, The Texas Observer, Chance Magazine, and High Plains Literary Review. She lives in Austin with her engineer husband Axel and two white cats, and is an active member of First English Lutheran Church.
Agha Shahid Ali writes, "Only the best writers put us right at the site of myth and thus assert, for us, our right to be part of the beginning and end of any world, any heaven. That Jill Alexander Essbaum does it so quietly, so delicately, and puts herself, and us, at the center of Heaven itself leads me only to envy. For how else can one convincingly transcend the domestic? There is simply no self-congratulation in these poems. Just a graceful, magical way of taking oneself - and one's bare uncertainties - for granted."
1999 Bakeless Nonfiction Prize
Kevin Oderman is Professor of English at West Virginia University, where he teaches American literature and creative writing. Over the last ten years, his essays have appeared in the Northwest Review, Southwest Review, North American Review, in Shenandoah, and in several other literary journals. He has twice taught abroad on Fulbrights, first in Thessaloniki, Greece, and subsequently in Lahore, Pakistan.
Scott Russell Sanders writes, "Although the universe holds together faithfully, our own precious lives seem to scatter like blown leaves. How to bind up one's memories, yearnings, travels, scraps of knowledge, loves and lamentations into a coherent whole? That is Kevin Oderman's great theme in these compelling essays. He joins piece to piece with a poet's feel for elegant language and a carpenter's feel for sturdy joints. He's at ease outdoors as well as indoors-- fishing in rivers as well as books, hunting in the wilds as well as museums. While Oderman writes of his private journeys in search of coherence, he also invites his readers to think about the fissures and patterns in their own lives."