2008

On November 19, the winners of the National Book Awards were announced.  Once again, a Guggenheim Fellow was among them:  Mark Doty, class of 1994, received the prize for Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins).  The judges applauded Fire to Fire as a “generous retrospective volume” that proved that this “gifted young poet has become a master.”

Five other Guggenheim Fellows were among this year’s finalists: Aleksandar Hemon (2003) for Fiction; Drew Gilpin Faust (1986) and Jane Mayer (2008) for Nonfiction; and Frank Bidart (1979) and Reginald Gibbons (1983) for Poetry.

Maxine Hong Kingston, a 1982 Guggenheim Fellow, was also honored at the ceremony, receiving the 2008 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.  Author of such award-winning nonfiction works as The Woman Warrior (Knopf, 1976; National Book Critics’ Circle Award) and China Men (Knopf, 1980; American Book Award and National Book Award), Ms. Kingston began work on her novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (Vintage, 1990) during her Guggenheim term; she received the PEN USA West Award for that publication.  President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 1997.

2007

In 2007, nine Guggenheim Fellows were finalists for the National Book Award, and all of the Poetry nominees were Fellows:

Fiction:
Lydia Davis '97, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Denis Johnson '86, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Jim Shepard '05, Like You'd Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf)

Nonfiction:
Arnold Rampersad '87, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf)

Poetry:
Linda Gregerson '00, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Robert Hass '79, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
David Kirby '03, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
Stanley Plumly '73, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company)
Ellen Bryant Voigt '78, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Company)

Denis Johnson took home the award for fiction and Robert Hass, who was also the Library of Congress’ eighth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (1995-97), won in the poetry category.