Live Blogging at the Northern California Book Awards

12:51pm: Ok, let’s give this a go. Barb and I are at the SFPL’s Koret Auditorium for the Northern California Book Awards. This is my first time here and my first time attempt at live blogging an event.

The Koret just got opened up and folks are streaming in from the outside and it looks to be a well attended event. Not bad considering that it is an absolutely perfect Bay Area weather day outside. I don’t know many of the nominees personally so I can’t tell you who’s here and who’s not but we’ll figure it out as we go along.

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12:55pm: Who is here: Richard Silberg of Poetry Flash; Childrens’ Lit nominee Yuyi Morales; Poetry nominee John Olivares Espinoza; John Oliver Simon of Poetry Inside Out, Olivia E. Sears, Executive Director, Center for Art in Translation; and many more are in the house.

And the awards are under way with Mark Andre Singer of the Northern California Book Reviewers is the MC for this afternoon.

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1:18pm: The Nominees for Children’s Literature are:
Steinbeck’s Ghost by Lewis Buzbee (Feiwel & Friends), Just In Case: A Trickster Tale and Spanish Alphabet Book by Yuyi Morales (Roaring Brook Press), Facts of Life: Stories by
Gary Soto (Harcourt Children’s Books), A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts by Pamela S. Turner (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), and The Dragon’s Child:
A Story of Angel Island by Laurence Yep and Dr. Kathleen S. Yep (HarperCollins).

And the winner is: Pamela S. Turner for A Life in the Wild: George Schaller’s Struggle to Save the Last Great Beasts

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1:24pm: The Nominees for Fiction are:
Lady Lazarus by Andrew Foster Altschul (Harcourt), Doctor Olaf van Schuler’s Brain by Kirsten Menger-Anderson (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill), The Delivery Room by Sylvia Brownrigg (Counterpoint), Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein by Molly Dwyer (Lost Coast Press), and
No One You Know by Michelle Richmond (Delacorte Press).

And the winner is: Sylvia Brownrigg for The Delivery Room.

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1:35pm: The Nominees for General Nonfiction are:
Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines by Richard A. Muller (W.W. Norton), The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (Island Press), A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano by Katie Hafner (Bloomsbury), Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named
Isaias Hellman Created California by Frances Dinkelspiel (St. Martin’s Press), and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan (The Penguin Press).

And the winner is: Richard A. Muller for Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines.

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1:45pm: The Nominees for Creative Nonfiction are:
Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life by John Adams (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan (Voice), Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction by David Sheff (Houghton Mifflin), and Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy: On Being an American Citizen by Susan Griffin (Trumpeter).

And the winner is: John Adams for Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life.

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1:50pm: The Nominees for Poetry are:
Lucky Break by Terry Ehret (Sixteen Rivers Press), The Date Fruit Elegies by John Olivares Espinoza (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe), Inverse Sky by John Isles (University of Iowa Press), Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, New & Selected by August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and the true keeps calm biding its story by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta Press).

And the winner is: Rusty Morrison for the true keeps calm biding its story.

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2:00pm: The Nominees for Translation:
The Old Man’s Verses by Ivan Divis, Translated from Czech by Deborah Garfinkle (Host Publications); Odes and Elegies by Friedrich Hölderlin, Translated from German by Nick Hoff (Wesleyan University Press); State of Exile by Cristina Peri Rossi, Translated from Spanish
by Marilyn Buck (City Lights Publishers); Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya, Translated from Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions); and Belonging: New Poetry by Iranians Around the World, Translated from Persian by Niloufar Talebi (North Atlantic Books).

And the winner is: Katherine Silver‘s translation of Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya.

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2:06pm: The final two awards are the Special Recognition Award given to Paintings in Proust:
A Visual Companion to In Search of Lost Time
by Eric Karpeles (Thames & Hudson) and the Fred Cody Award For Lifetime Achievement in Community & Literature awarded to novelist, publisher, and playwright–Dorothy Bryant.

More to come later but props to Mark Singer for being a great MC and keeping everything moving. We’re off to the after party. Later.

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