The Southern Book Prize Winners at the NVNR Awards Dinner: Speeches

Silas House (All These Ghosts) and Christy Mandin (Millie Fleur Saves the Night) were both present at the New Voices New Rooms Conference earlier this month to be honored at the NVNR Awards Dinner on August 4. Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Happy Land) was not able to attend in person, but provided a statement which was read aloud by her publisher.

Melissa Taylor, (Emcee):
Hello. Booksellers. Hi. And we're back. I hope everyone is enjoying their delicious food and their beverages. so we're going to jump into the book awards part of the evening. So the Southern Book Prize is an indie bookstore, curated, but reader chosen award. The finalists are nominated by booksellers, and then they're voted on by our customers. The winners were chosen by popular vote from a ballot of finalists in fiction, nonfiction and literature for young readers, making every Southern Book Prize winner a true southern reader favorite. SIBA donates $200 to each winner's charity of choice.

This year's winners are all truly exceptional, and they are all beloved by booksellers. I'm going to start with our Southern Book Prize nonfiction winner, and this year our winner is Silas House for his poetry collection, All These Ghosts. Sam Miller of Carmichael's Bookstore says of "House's work resonates most deeply the closer he stays to his Appalachian roots. With poems like "Double Creek Girl" and "Lunchlady," He transports the reader to a hardscrabble start that was tough, but also suffused with the joy of family ties and the beauty of nature. Poems about queerness, protest, time, sickness, and soup beans all exist side by side in this collection, as in life." Silas has asked that his prize money go to the Faulkner Morgan Archives, the biggest LGBTQ archive in the South, and we're honored to have Silas here tonight.

Silas House (Southern Book Prize Winner, (Nonfiction):
Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to thank CBS board and staff and all southern indie booksellers,, for this award. I thank all of the readers who voted for All These Ghosts and made it a word of mouth success. I'm so honored and thankful for it. And I would not have a career if not for indie booksellers, especially from SIBA and NAIBA. So thank you all. You all have always been so kind to me and welcomed me into your stores for 25 years now. And there's really no bigger honor than that. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

I thank my family, both blood and chosen as many of these poems are about. And for them. speaking of family, I also think Lynn York, Robin Muira, Michael Levatino, Sandra Beasley, Ariel Hebert, and everyone at Blair for their hard work in getting this book into the world. I was fortunate to write a poem that got a lot of attention in the news and online. And when some publishers reached out about the possibility of a collection in response to that, I knew I wanted to go with Blair because I respect them so much and the way they're seeking to diversify and change the way we think about the South. I'm also proud to be a Blair author, because it's a nonprofit and it's women led, and that's important to me. Blair seeks to speak truth to power and to stoke resistance through art.

For the sake of my publicity team at Algonquin and Little Brown, and for my own self-interest, I need to do a brief commercial to ask you to watch for galleys of my new book. The Tulip Poplars, that comes out October 13th. It's a love story that spans the 20th century, and I put my whole heart and soul into that book, so I hope you'll read it and tell other people about it.

I believe that booksellers are on the front lines of democracy and intelligence and even civilization. And we are living in absurd times when those things are being threatened and belittled. It continues to boggle my mind. And so in that spirit, I will close with one stanza from my poem "The New Regime," because I think so many of us in this room love books, and we love our country, and we are fighting for both. So this is from "The New Regime":

To survive:
Be cunning but kind,
be shrewd but never mean.
Be a knife that is sharpened
each time they cut you but
keep the meat of your heart
tender. Be aware. Watch closely.
Do not truck in empire.
We need no kingdom for the
power and glory are ours, forever.

Thank you.

Melissa Taylor, (Emcee):
All right, so now we're going to move on to the Southern Book Prize for Young Readers. So this year's winner is Christy Mandin for her book, Millie Fleur Saves the Night. Mandy Harris of Angel Wings Bookstore in Stem, North Carolina, said of Millie Fleur, "This stunningly illustrated picture book is fun to read aloud and shows what happens when you approach something that you always thought was scary with curiosity." Christy has requested that her prize be donated to the Phelan-Mcdermid Syndrome Foundation, and we're so honored that Christie is here with us tonight.

Christy Mandin (Southern Book Prize Winner, Young Readers)
Okay. So much like Julie [Isgrigg], I'm not even going to pretend like I have memorized this because I am an artist first and foremost. And I thought that that meant that I would stay in my little art burrow for most of my career. And I keep finding myself having to do this, which is wonderful, but it's terrifying. Also this week, I know maybe many of you are also suffering this plight if you have children, but school is starting back. So I am up here rubbing the two brain cells I have together to create a spark to bring you this speech. So please show me some grace.

Okay, so it means so much to me as a born and raised and still residing there Southerner to receive the Southern Book Prize. I grew up in rural Georgia and in the 80s and 90s there were no bookstores near my little map dot of a town. As a matter of fact, in the county that I grew up in, there is only now one bookstore, and I am about to be 43 years old. So much of my life, there was no bookstore. That bookstore is new. so we are in a bit of a bookstore desert. And when I was a kid, going to a bookstore meant a day trip to the big city. It was a big deal. I would spend an enormous amount of time choosing my books, and then I would devour them on the car ride home, which was pretty frustrating for my parents because apparently I had failed to understand the logistics and the economics of the situation as lower income country folk. We couldn't just go back to the bookstore. Every time I plowed my way through a book haul at lightning speed, it was a once, maybe twice a year event for me. It was a big deal. Oh, I might cry. I am going to cry. Just blow past it. Thank you. And now, as an author, I get to visit bookstores all over the country and see my own books sitting on the shelves. And meet the people who are helping children discover books that might become as important to them as my own childhood book calls were to me. I don't think I'll ever get over that.

Getting to see Mille Fleur in Southern bookstores is especially meaningful to me, because I poured much of that little girl from rural Georgia into Mille Fleur. She is me. I was weird. I'm still weird. I'm going to stay that way. I was an imaginative kid and an only child with no neighbor kids to play with, so I lived in my imagination. It was literally the only thing to do in the 90s. I usually I tell this story to the 4-to-8 crowd and it blows their mind. So I grew up surrounded by the particular kind of wonder that comes from growing up in the rural South without YouTube: kids, the woods, the bugs, the gardens, the stories, the strange things you come upon that are distinctly Southern when you pay attention.

So to have a book about a wonderfully weird little girl from my imagination find its way into the hands of Southern children feels incredibly special. The Southern booksellers who nominated this book gave it this incredible honor, but the booksellers across the country have helped carry Millie for much farther than I ever could have imagined. In fact, she's reached children in at least eight languages and counting across the world. Thanks to your support here in the United States. You've sold my books. You've recommended them to families. You've put them into the hands of children who might have needed permission that day to be weird, to be exactly who they are. That kind of championing is such a gift to an author. I can dream up the book in my studio labor over its creation, but I can't create that moment when a bookseller connects with a reader and thinks, oh, I know who needs this book. That's the magic that you make.

So thank you to the southern booksellers who nominated Millie for Saves the Night, and to the booksellers across the country who've shown a spotlight on Millie Fleur and helped her find her readers. Thank you for believing in the power of books and for knowing your communities, and for making room on your shelves. For a wonderfully weird little girl with absolutely no intention of ever being ordinary. I'm so proud that Millie Fleur gets to belong to the South in this way, but I'm even prouder that she's found a home far beyond it. So thank you.

Melissa Taylor, (Emcee):
All right. And now for the Southern Book Prize for fiction. Our winner this year is Dolen Perkins-Valdez for her luminous novel Happy Land. Ada of Main Street Books in Davidson, North Carolina, said of Happy Land, "Happy Land's dual narrative celebrate a little known, egalitarian community of formerly enslaved men and women in the North Carolina mountains in both the historical and contemporary points of view. Perkins-Valdez explores the intergenerational bonds and tensions that honoring one's ancestry cultivates a triumphant tale." Dolen has requested that her prize go to the Land Loss Prevention Project in North Carolina. Accepting the award on Dolan's behalf tonight is Valerie Whaley, the regional director of PRH Field Sales.

Valerie Whaley (Regional Director, Penguin Random House Field Sales on behalf of Dolen Perkins-Valdez)
Hello. I'm very honored to accept this award on behalf of Dolen. And she writes, "I have never received an award that specifically recognized my personal and very emotional ties to the South, as well as my commitment to stories that feature our rich and complicated history. This award is meaningful to me in ways I cannot adequately express. I can only say that I am deeply grateful to the booksellers who nominated, read and supported Happy Land. I also thank the many people that voted. You are my community and you always have been. Thank you."