2000 SEBA Book Award Winners

Fiction

Fred Chappell
Picador USA
September 1999 $24
0312242158

Jess Kirkman returns to the North Carolina mountain town of his boyhood to tend to his ailing mother, and clean out his deceased father's workroom. What he discovers there leads him -- and the reader -- on an unforgettable journey through the secret life of Jess's father, Joe Robert, which culminates in a moment of profound mystery and comedy.

Nonfiction

Janisse Ray
Milkweed Editions
November 1999 $19.95
157131234X

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound vacationers by the hedge at the edge of the road and by hulks of old cars and stacks of blown-out tires. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood tells how a childhood spent in rural isolation and steeped in religious fundamentalism grew into a passion to save the almost vanished longleaf pine ecosystem that once covered the South. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray redeems two Souths.

Cookbook

No award was given in this category in 2000

Poetry

Rodney Jones
Mariner Books
February 2001 $13
0618082492

Exulting in the speech of his native Alabama, Rodney Jones's new poems combine satire and ode, formal lament and ribald joke. James Dickey praised this poet's early work as "one of our most poignant and inescapable renditions of the agony at the historical razor's edge." Now, in his sixth book, Jones extends his emotional and stylistic range. He writes of football and feminism, of DDT and family, of crows and sex, of ink and raccoons and perpetual-motion machines. In many of these poems the southern drawl lives forever, riding on the tide of regional language, poking fun yet delighting in it.

Children's

Ann Heiskell Rickey (author)
Ardeane Heiskell Smith (illustrator)
Old Canyon Press
December 1995 $12.95
0966783417

An illustrated collection of fifty humorous verses about bugs and sea creatures.