Fiction

Winner: Ted Gilley (Bennington, VT) for Bliss
Ted Gilley is a native of southwestern Virginia but has lived in New England for thirty years. His poems and short stories have appeared in Poetry Northwest, Northwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, the National Review, New England Review, Free Verse, and many other magazines and anthologies. Awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts/Vermont Arts Council and the McCullough Library in 2007, Gilley won the Alehouse Press (San Francisco) national poetry competition in 2008.

Runner Up: Garth Risk Hallberg (Brooklyn, NY) for The Descent of Man: Stories
Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family, a novella. Other writing has appeared in Glimmer Train, Slate, and the anthology Best New American Voices 2008. His fiction has earned Pushcart Prize and Believer Book Award nominations and fellowships from New York University's MFA program and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Poetry

Winner: Shane Book (San Francisco, CA) for Fourth World
Shane Book's poetry appears in journals in the US, UK, and Canada and in many anthologies, most recently Gathering Ground (U of Michigan P). He was educated at the University of Western Ontario, the University of Victoria, New York University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry. The recipient of scholarships to Cave Canem, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and Breadloaf, his awards include a New York Times Fellowship in Poetry, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a National Magazine Award.

Runner Up: Nicole Cooley (Glen Ridge, NJ) for Milk Dress
Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her new book of poems, Breach, about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in March 2010. Her first book of poetry, Resurrection, won the 1995 Walt Whitman Award and was published by LSU Press in 1996. Her second book of poetry, The Afflicted Girls, about the Salem witch trials of 1692, came out with LSU Press in April 2004 and was chosen as one of the best poetry books of the year by Library Journal. She also published a novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love, with Regan Books/Harper Collins. She has received a Discovery/The Nation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in the Nation, Poetry, Missouri Review, Pleaides, and Mississippi Review, among other magazines. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Queens College—City University of New York where she directs the new MFA program in creative writing and literary translation.