Fiction

Doug Marlette
HarperCollins
October 2001 $26
0060186305

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning Doug Marlette comes a captivating story of family and forgiveness, of indomitable women and their courageous, headstrong men. It is the story of an enduring friendship, and of a bittersweet longing as old as Shakespeare and as contemporary as today's headlines.

Pick Cantrell is a successful newspaper cartoonist whose career has hit the skids. Fired from his job in New York and in the grip of a midlife meltdown, he returns with his wife and son to a small North Carolina town, where he confronts the ghosts of his past in the form of the family matriarch and his boyhood nemesis, Mama Lucy. While attempting to renovate an old house and repair his damaged marriage, Pick discovers his family's ties to the historic home and his own connection to a place he belonged to long before it ever belonged to him. What follows is an extraordinary story within a story, as Pick uncovers startling truths about himself and about the role his grandmother played in the tragic general textile strike Of 1934, one of the least-known major events of American history.

Moving from the frontlines of New York City publishing to the storied backroads of the old South, The Bridge is a sweeping and poignant tale of love and betrayal, forbidden passions and longburied secrets, of a man's struggle with his heritage and with himself. And the ancient bridge where past and present meet.

A novel both comic and tragic-and written with the same wit, insight, and unflinching honesty Marlette has long brought to his prizewinning cartoons -- The Bridge explores how much we ever really know about others, and, most important, about ourselves.

Nonfiction

Rick Bragg
Alfred A. Knopf
August 2001 $25
0375410627

No one writes about the South like Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg ("All Over But the Shoutin"). Once again, he lends his voice to the working people of the Deep South, and tells the story of a memorable figure in a singular time--a man on a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama/Georgia border.

Cookbook

No award was given in this category in 2002

Poetry

No award was given in this category in 2002

Children's

J.J. Reneaux (author)
James Ransome (illustrator)
HarperCollins
January 2001 $17.99
0688162533

Did you know that bears used to be the Keepers of Fire? Or that alligators used to wear suits that were as smooth as silk? Have you heard the zzzh-zzzah sound of the Poopampareno, or the one about BooZoo?

With astonishing vigor, J. J. Reneaux brings us eight time-honored tales, adding the spice of her family's rich cultural traditions to her tellings. Rooted in African-American, Appalachian, Cajun, Creole, English, Scots-Irish, and Native American traditions, the stories she's chosen are sometimes laugh-aloud funny, sometimes deliciously scary, often thought provoking, and always entertaining. James Ransome adds to the fun with expressive watercolors that show an ensemble of memorable characters, including clever Lapin the Rabbit and quick-thinking Aunt Molly.

A treasury of beloved stories for a new generation, How Animals Saved the People is brimming with flavor. It's a bodacious, which is to say remarkable, folktale collection!