2001 SEBA Book Award Winners

Fiction

Tony Earley
Little Brown and Company
June 2000 $24.95
0316199648

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

Rick Bragg
University of Alabama Press
May 2000 $29.95
0817310274

From children who are killers to an elderly woman's last bequest; from State Troopers saving potential suicides on Floridean bridge to an Inmate Rodeo at Angola Prison in Louisiana; here are more than sixty stories by Pultizer Prize winner Rick Bragg showing the sadness and the humanity that exist all around us.

This collection showcases Bragg's talent for turning seemingly ordinary situations into extraordinary stories by bringing together his most recent feature articles most of them written for the New York Times. Bragg explores such questions as: What happens to someone released from prison for a crime he didn't commit? Who takes care of the graves of poor people? What keeps an elderly woman from selling her land for a healthy profit? Bragg's curiosity often leads him to society's margins, where he returns with some of the most insightful and poignant journalism we have seen in some time.

Cookbook

No award was given in this category in 2001

Poetry

Peter Meinke
University of Pittsburgh Press
May 2000 $12.95
0822957248

Watching Steffi beat Monica on tv at Fat Jack's in Provincetown I was seized with an urge as I sometimes am to write a syllabic poem on the spot which was none too clean and packed to the gills with elbows and shrimp Hey Sparky I yelled to the bartender you got a pen? Sure he said knowing my propensities make it ten syllables a line Well why not I said but on the other hand why? Because look this is the tenth game of the third set Sparky said so I smoothed out the napkin while the crowd screamed You can do it! and wrote.

Children's

Kate DiCamillo
Candlewick Press
March 2000 $15.99
0763607762

In a first novel recalling the fiction of Harper Lee and Carson McCullers, the narrator--ten-year-old Opal--describes her first summer in the town of Naomi, Florida, and all the good things that happen because of her big, ugly dog, Winn-Dixie.