'Byrd' wins Crook's Corner Book Prize: $1,000 and 365 free glasses of wine

Kim Church of Raleigh, author the poignant debut novel, "Byrd," has won $1,000 and a free glass of wine every day for a year at Crook's Corner restaurant in Chapel Hill. She's the winner of the second annual Crook's Corner Book Prize, announced Monday evening at the restaurant.
Novelist, short story writer and biographer Randall Kenan, who teaches English and comparative literature at UNC Chapel Hill, chose "Byrd" from a short list of four novels.
"All the books were beautifully written, interesting to read, and often fun," Kenan emailed today. "Byrd stood out as the most successful artistic expression and the novel with the purest, most daring and moving language.  Plus the story is so very powerful.  I think people will be reading this book for quite some time to come."
The 2014 inaugural winner was Wiley Cash of Wilmington for his novel "A Land More Kind Than Home." The judge was short story writer and novelist Jill McCorkle.
Next year's judge will be novelist Lee Smith.
The contest is open to first-time novelists whose work is set in the American South, though the authors can live outside the South.
Entries are now being accepted for the third annual Crook's Corner Book Prize. For more information: Info@crookscornerbookprize.com.

The Crook's Corner Book Prize Long List

Queen Sugar, by Natalie Baszile / A Pamela Dorman book/Viking
Byrd, by Kim Church / Dzanc Books
The Resurrectionist, by Matthew Guinn / W.W. Norton
Flying Shoes, by Lisa Howorth / Bloomsbury USA
Remember Me Like This, by Bret Anthony Johnston / Random House
I Shall Be Near To You, by Erin Lindsay McCabe / Crown
Heart of Palm, by Laura Lee Smith / Grove Press
In the Garden of Stone, by Susan Tekulve / Hub City Press
Saint Monkey, by Jacinda Townsend / W.W. Norton
The Ways of the Dead, by Neely Tucker / Viking
Mother of Rain, by Karen Spears Zacharias / Mercer University

The eleven books that made the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Long List were published between January 1, 2013, and June 30, 2014, and were selected from entries submitted by major publishers, independent publishers and self-publishers. The goal of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize is to encourage new writers.

'Dixie Dew' author Ruth Moose on UNC-TV 'Book Watch' today at 5 p.m.

'Doing It at the Dixie Dew' is one of the catchiest titles of 2014, and the praise goes to former Charlottean Ruth Moose, an Albemarle native who lives in Fearrington Village near Pittsboro.

You can hear her this afternoon at 5 on D.G. Martin's "Book Watch" (UNC-TV.) She'll tell you how she first wrote this cozy mystery and entered it into a contest. She didn't win, but she got good advice from one of the contest judges.And unlike many other writers, Moose has the perseverance of a hound dog. She re-wrote the mystery and years later re-entered the Malice Domestic Competition for Best First Traditional Mystery contest with her  revised manuscript. This time, she won, and her prize was publication and a nice check.

Novelist Lee Smith calls "Dixie Dew" a "fast-paced romp through small-town (Southern) society -- mayhem and maybe even murder lurk behind those frilly lace curtains at the Dixie Dew B&B. This entertaining novel is just as rich and delicious as inn keeper Beth McKenzie's lemon creme cake."   

Moose, who taught for 15 years in the creative program at UNC Chapel Hill, is now writing a sequel to "Dixie Dew."

Sarah Dessen and Lee Smith to appear on segments of N..C. Bookwatch

Sarah Dessen

Bookwatch has become such a favorite in our house that we now record it. No matter the guest, the host, former Charlottean D.G. Martin, is himself a treat. No one is more animated, and no one works as charmingly to draw out the essence of the writer and his or her work. If you're new to the state, it's a wonderful introduction to the personalities and minds of our literary riches.

Lee Smith

This Sunday, Aug. 24, young adult writer Sarah Dessen will appear on the show.

 

Her most recent title, "The Moon and More," set on Emerald Isle, recently won the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award in the young adult category. Lead character, Emaline, loses both her long-time local boyfriend and her newfound summer love. There's heartbreak, of course. But new beginnings await.


Bookwatch airs at noon on Sundays and at 5 p.m. on Thursdays on UNC-TV.

On Aug. 31, award-winning Hillsborough novelist Lee Smith will appear on Bookwatch. Her most recent novel, "Guests on Earth," includes a character based on Zelda Fitzgerald and her stay at the elegant and now-defunct Highland Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Asheville.
 
 

Chapel Hill's Elizabeth Spencer Wins $30,000 Rea Award

The late great Eudora Welty referred to Elizabeth Spencer's short stories as having a "certain prankish gaiety" about them. Now Spencer, that long-legged, Mississippi-born beauty who lives in Chapel Hill and is 92, has won the coveted $30,000 Rea Award for the Short Story.

Elizabeth Spencer

Cynthia Ozick, the first winner of the Rea Award in 1986, calls the prize, "Our little Nobel."
Jurors for the award are Mississippi-born Richard Ford ("The Sportswriter," "Independence Day"), Alabama-born Tom Franklin ("Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter") and Hillsborough's Lee Smith ("Fair and Tender Ladies," "Guests on Earth").
In their citation, the jurors said Spencer's stories "...revel in their delicious verbal (and moral) distinctions, take liberties and never fail to pay off."
"It is not at all that Ms. Spencer has lasted as a writer," they wrote, "but rather that she has thrived at the height of her powers to a degree that is unparalleled in modern letters."
Spencer is the author of eight short story collections and nine novels. "Starting Over" is her most recent collection. She is also the author of the 1960 novel, "The Light in the Piazza," made into a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer  movie in 1962 starring Olivia de Havilland, Yvette Mimieux and George Hamilton.
Previous winners of the Rea Award include John Updike, James Salter, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, as well as Ford and Welty.

Here is Spencer being interviewed in January on D.G. Martin's "Book Watch."

Here is the Paris Review interview with Spencer from 1989.

New books from Carolinas Writers

Carolinas writers are busy cranking out books.
Vanderbilt professor and Rutherfordton native Tony Earley has a new story collection,  "Mr. Tall,"

Alan Michael Parker

out in August. It's been 20 years since Earley's last collection, "Here We Are in Paradise." So what's he been doing? I'll save that news.

Former N.C. Poet Laureate Fred Chappell has a collection of poems, "Familiars," due in August from LSU Press. If you haven't guessed, it's about cats.
Davidson's Alan Michael Parker has a novel due in June from Dzanc Publishers. Says Parker: "The Committee on Town Happiness" is set in a fictional small town, not a college town. Kirkus Review: "Parker's not trying to be Dostoevsky here but rather wishes to create light and good-natured entertainment -- and he succeeds."
 UNC Charlotte's Aimee Parkinson's eerily intriguing novel, "The Petals of Your Eyes," is out in May from Starcherone Books. About her collection of stories, "The Innocent Party," Cris Mazza ("How to Leave a Country") wrote: "These stories are like running a finger around a seemingly smooth edge of glass -- you don't know you've been cut until you bleed."
Charlotte's Kim Wright, whose novel "Love in Mid Air," was praised by Publisher's Weekly for "its fresh perspective and sympathetic characters few writers can match," has a novel, "The Unexpected Waltz," due in May from Gallery Books.

Lee Smith

Scott Ely was a popular fiction writing professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill. Ely died in October, and his last novel, "Plumb's Bluff," is due in June from Livingston Press. If you know Ely's work, it won't surprise you to find a hero gunning to win a national rapids race, as well as a murder to solve and a Romanian sculptress who swims nude in the river's baptismal pool. Unadulterated Ely.

Hendersonville native Robert Morgan ("The Road from Gap Creek") says he's finishing a novel set in 1850 -- "The Year of the Fugitive Slave Law" -- about two slaves who escape from the Carolinas and make their way to Ithaca, N.Y.
Down in Sullivans Island, S.C., Josephine Humphreys ("Nowhere Else on Earth") is working on a novel with a contemporary setting and is also absorbed in "something -- I'm not sure what -- about Colonial Haiti. I'll be back with more on that.
Hillsborough's Lee Smith ("Guests on Earth") has finished a memoir called "Dimestore." Smith's dad owned the Ben Franklin dimestore in the small, coal-mining town of Grundy, Va. The project, she says, "got a kick start recently when the entire town was demolished as part of the flood-control project." The house she was born in was also bulldozed. Someone salvaged the Smiths' brass door knocker, which now hangs in her study.