Middlebury's Bread Loaf Writers' Conference awards 2009 literary prizes

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - The Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference announced the winners of the 14th annual Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prizes. The prizes are awarded each year to aid and encourage writers seeking publication of their first books in a particular genre.

The judge for the poetry category was Linda Gregerson, author of “Magnetic North” (2007) and “Waterborne” (2004). She selected Nick Lantz’s “We Don’t Know We Don’t Know” for the 2009 Bakeless poetry prize.

Lantz was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2007-2008, where he also received his master’s degree in 2005. His poetry has appeared in Mid-American Review, Southern Review, Locuspoint, Gulf Coast and Prairie Schooner. His second book was selected by Robert Pinsky for the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2010. He is currently a freelance copyeditor living in Madison.

Percival Everett, author of “The Water Cure” (2007) and “Wounded: A Novel” (2005), served as the judge for the fiction category. He selected Belle Boggs’s “Mattaponi Queen” for the 2009 Bakeless fiction prize.

Boggs’s work has appeared in Glimmer Train, the Oxford American and the Best New American Voices series. She earned her master’s degree in fiction from the University of California at Irvine, where she was awarded the Glenn Schaeffer Fellowship from the International Institute of Modern Letters (now the Black Mountain Institute). She grew up in King William County, Va., and has taught writing in public schools in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Durham, N.C.; and Washington, D.C.

Sue Halpern, author of “Can’t Remember What I Forgot” (2008) and “Four Wings and a Prayer” (2001), judged the nonfiction category. She selected Kim Dana Kupperman’s “I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives from the Interior” for the 2008 Bakeless creative nonfiction prize.

Kupperman has had work published in AGNI online, Best American Essays 2006, Brevity, Fourth Genre, Hotel Amerika, Ninth Letter and River Teeth. She has received notable mentions in Best American Essays 2007, Best American Essays 2008 and the Pushcart Prize XXXI anthologies. Other honors include a 2009 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Literature Fellowship, a 2008 Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship, the 2003 Robert J. DeMott Prose Prize from the literary journal Quarter After Eight, and first place in the 1996 Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics Essay Contest. She is the founder of Welcome Table Press, dedicated to publishing and celebrating the essay, in all its forms. She works as managing editor of The Gettysburg Review.

The three winning authors will have their book length manuscripts published by Graywolf Press and will receive fellowships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in August 2010. Complete guidelines for the Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes are available online at http://www.bakelessprize.org. New submissions will be accepted from Sept. 15 through Nov. 1, 2009.

For more information contact Jennifer Bates, the Bakeless Prize coordinator for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, at (802) 443-2018 or bakelessprize@middlebury.edu.