Michigan Literary Fiction Awards Winners

Liza Wieland is the author of four previous works of fiction: The Names of the Lost, Discovering America, You Can Sleep While I Drive, and Bombshell, as well as a volume of poems, Near Alcatraz. Her work has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Christopher Isherwood Foundation and the North Carolina Arts Council. She teaches creative writing and literature at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC.

Of the book, Peter Ho Davies writes, "Conjuring the entwined lives of teachers and students in two schools (and two generations) on either side of the Atlantic, A Watch of Nightingales stands alongside The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Goodbye, Mr Chips as a testament to the responsibilities, rewards, and risks of teaching. This is a book of luminous insight and quiet but telling wisdom, about youth and maturity and the bridge of loss and remorse that connects them. Liza Wieland's is a mature and deeply moving vision, conveyed in prose that sings as sure and clear as the birds of her title."

Wendy Rawlings is the author of the short story collection Come Back Irish (The Ohio State University Press, 2001) and has published stories and essays in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, AGNI, Cincinnati Review and other magazines. She teaches in and currently directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. The Agnostics is her first novel.

Michael Byers writes: "Full of drama large and small, packed to the rafters with intelligent observation, and memorably thoughtful, The Agnostics is a consistent pleasure. Funny, lively, knowing and generous, Rawlings moves effortlessly from the minute negotiations of family existence to the big, often neglected questions that haunt and enrich our lives from beginning to end."

Elaine Ford is the author of five novels. For her fiction she has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is Professor Emerita at the University of Maine, where she taught creative writing and literature. Presently she lives in Harpswell, Maine.

"Elaine Ford's The American Wife roams the territory between the intellect and the heart," writes Laura Kasischke. "She writes of the human condition with precision, in language that is both grave and conversational. Her characters step out of the real world onto the page, where she develops them quietly, but with compassionate fullness. This writer grips the reader with her keen knowledge of the psyche of individuals—their motives and secrets—and also with the surprising things that happen to them."

Jean McGarry is the author of six previous books of fiction: Airs of Providence, The Very Rich Hours, The Courage of Girls, Home at Last, Gallagher's Travels, and Dream Date. She is a professor of fiction at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. A Bad and Stupid Girl is her third novel.

Eileen Pollack calls A Bad and Stupid Girl "a jewel of a novel, every facet perfectly placed and shining. Jean McGarry's exquisite prose leaves one breathless with admiration, and her creations remain in the reader's mind like college roommates one loved and now misses and longs to see again."

"A gemlike portrait," writes Laura Kasischke, "A Bad and Stupid Girl takes us on a journey of epic proportions into the psyches of two young women who are both creatures of their time and heartbreakingly familiar. The novel is funny, and moving, and revelatory. It traces the evolution of an unready adulthood with unsentimental accuracy. A graceful work, full of triumph and surprise."

Joan Frank is the author of the story collection Boys Keep Being Born, which was both a Bay Area Book Reviewers' Award and Paterson Fiction Award Finalist. Her stories appear in many journals and anthologies, including The Antioch Review, The Iowa Review, Salmagundi, Confrontation, Americans in Paris, and The Book of Eros. She is a MacDowell Colony and VCCA Fellow, Pushcart Prize nominee, recipient of a Barbara Deming Grant, and winner of the Iowa Fiction Award and Emrys Fiction Award. She lives in Northern California. Miss Kansas City is her first novel.

Laura Kasischke writes, "Miss Kansas City is both a marvelously satisfying story of friendship and love, and a braided exploration of relationships in our time and place. With precision, wit, and compassion, Joan Frank has provided us with an odyssey into the heart—a gorgeous meditation on what it is to be in love, and alone. The writing is clear, and the vision reflected in that clarity is both luminous and honest."

Eileen Pollack calls Miss Kansas City "an utterly convincing portrait of a world at once specific to its time and place, and yet also universal. Both heartbreaking and redeeming."

Judged by Laura Kasischke and Eileen Pollack

R.M. Kinder, is the author of the 1991 Willa Cather Award winning collection Sweet Angel Band. Her prose has appeared in Passages North, Literal Latte, Notre Dame Review, Other Voices, Connecticut Review, Southern Indiana Review, Descant (Ontario), Short Story, Chariton Review and The New York Times.

Eileen Pollack writes, "In the small, rural town of Buxton, acts of evil and compassion are twined so closely as to be nearly indivisible, and recognizably human characters are presented in such a way that they radiate light, yet also cast recognizably human shadows. One woman tries to convince her friends that she's seen a fat, black snake, which she hasn't, while another woman tries to convince her relatives that she's seen a mother bat with two babies clutched beneath her wings crawl up out of the ground, which she has. In such a way, the stories in this quietly powerful collection explore the seen and unseen world in which we all live. I read A Near-Perfect Gift from start to end without stopping, and, when I finished, found myself sitting in my darkened office, infused with an unexpected sense of peace."

Laura Kasischke writes, "A Near-Perfect Gift distinguishes itself from the average book of short-stories by its uncanniness. In these stories, familiar characters in commonplace settings are revealed to be more mysterious and unnerving in their plainness than any science fiction alien or horror fiction monster could be—but also fully human, recognizably *us*. Kinder writes with the x-ray vision of a Sherwood Anderson, and with the insight of a Freudian analyst, an interpreter of dreams, in language that could be as well suited to the traditional folktale or the hometown newspaper as to poetry of the French surrealists. Here is a collection of short fiction for our times: a mirror held up to the homely details, reflecting back to us the wild insides."

Judged by Nicholas Delbanco and Eileen Pollack

T.M. McNally, whose previous books include the novels Until Your Heart Stops and Almost Home, and the story collection, Low-Flying Aircraft, is this year's winner in the short fiction category, for his collection, Quick. McNally is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has also received the Smart Family Foundation Award from The Yale Review. He teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and lives in Scottsdale with Sally Ball and their three children.

Nicholas Delbanco writes, "The eleven short stories of Quick, taken separately and together, are an achievement of real substance and high style. Whether told in the first or third person, present or past tense, these stories signal artistry and a fresh yet seasoned talent. Such single-word titles as 'Insomnia' and 'Recovery' fail to conceal the 'Radical' expansiveness of the narrative singularities at hand; Mr. McNally offers both a 'Quick' read and a measured overview of our place and time."

In the novel category, our winner is W.D. Wetherell, for A Century of November. Wetherell's previous books include the novels Morning and Chekhov's Sister, the short story collections The Man Who Loved Levittown and Wherever That Great Heart May Be, and the memoir, North of Now. For the last five years he has held the Strauss Living grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, allowing him to devote five years exclusively to his writing; A Century of November was written thanks to their support. He lives in Lyme, NH, with his wife, son, and daughter.

Eileen Pollack writes, "A Century of November is an elegant, moving, and utterly convincing account of a father's attempt to understand the death of his only son in the trenches of Belgium during the very last days of World War I. In a strangely timeless and hypnotic narrative reminiscent of the best poetry of Wilfred Owen or Rupert Brooke or Timothy Findley's haunting novel The Wars, the author evokes the unvoiced grief and rage of a man who has recently lost his wife to the Spanish Influenza and his son to a battle in a town whose name he can't pronounce. Impulsively boarding a ferry, then a train, then a steamship, Charles Marden travels from his farm in Vancouver to the killing fields of Europe. Following the shadow of the first and only woman his son ever loved, Marden stumbles across a chaotic landscape so recently drenched by blood and poison gas that the truth seems not only difficult to ascertain, but ultimately unknowable and irrelevant."

In the novel category, our winner is Sheila O'Connor, for Where No Gods Came. O'Connor is the author of the novel-in-stories, Tokens of Grace, and has received fellowships from the Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, and Loft-McKnight, as well as the Tamarack Award for Fiction. She teaches writing in the M.F.A. program at Hamline University.

Nicholas Delbanco praises Where No Gods Came for "accomplish[ing] that difficult thing: it's a coherent story about incoherence, a shapely one about the lures of shapelessness. The various voices ring true. Ms. O'Connor writes of family and love and loss and youth at risk and hard-earned pleasure; she does so with a noticing eye and tone-perfect ear. Her sense of the landscape here described-both actual and metaphorical-is keen, and her language self-assured. This is a fine, fierce book."

Additional congratulations to Sheila O'Connor: Where No Gods Came has won a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award.

Maura Stanton, whose previous books include the novel, Molly Companion, and the story collections, The Country I Come From, and Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, is this year's winner in the short fiction category, for her collection, Cities in the Sea. Stanton teaches in the M.F.A. Program at Indiana University in Bloomington.

Of Maura Stanton's Cities in the Sea, Charles Baxter writes, it "has a cool and calm vision of catastrophe and of its persistence in our lives, and it combines this vision with a feeling for the survival of past trauma within the present. All her characters have interesting histories, and her stories are linked by an unsentimental view of storm-tossed, volcano-ridden ordinary existence, the calamities of everyday life. The stories are therefore both dark and buoyant, clear-sighted and oddly bracing, lyrical and obliquely comic. This is a fine book whose balance and tact I admired enormously."