Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction
Dorothy Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, and makes her home in Northern California. Her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Allison’s second novel, Cavedweller, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, won the 1998 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the Lillian Smith Prize. She is currently working on another novel, She Who.
Hanes Award for Poetry
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Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in rural southwest Georgia, graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and earned her M.F.A. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her books of poetry include Coming to Rest; Catching Light; Black Shawl; Wildwood Flower, which was the 1992 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest. Byer's poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and The Atlantic Monthly, as well as in numerous anthologies. She has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is currently Poet Laureate of North Carolina.James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South
Pamela Duncan is a novelist from North Carolina. Her debut novel, Moon Women, was a finalist for the 2002 Southeast Booksellers Association Book Award, and her second book, Plant Life, won the 2003 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction. Her latest novel, The Big Beautiful, will be released in March 2007. Duncan holds a B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in English from North Carolina State University. She lives in Saxaphaw, North Carolina.
Hillsdale Award for Fiction
Denise Giardina has published the novels Good King Harry, Storming Heaven, and The Unquiet Earth, which explores Union activities in the mine-fields of West Virginia from the 1930s into the 1990s. Giardina's most recent work, Saints and Villians, is a fictionalized biography of the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German Lutheran pastor who became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler. Giardina lives near Charleston and teaches at West Virginia State University.New Writing Award for Poetry
Jennifer Grotz is the author of Cusp, which received both the Bakeless Prize for Poetry and the Natalie Ornish Best First Book of Poetry Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her poems, translations, essays and reviews have appeared in the New England Review, Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and Boston Review. She currently serves as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and teachers poetry at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro..jpg)
Charlotte Matthews is the author of a full length collection of poetry, Green Stars, and two chapbooks, A Kind of Devotion and Biding Time. Her work has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Borderlands, Ecotone, Tar River Poetry, and The Potomac Review. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She teachers in the Bachelor of Interdisciplinary and Professional Studies at the University of Virginia.Bryan Family Foundation Award for Drama
Katori Hall is a playwright and performer who has published book reviews and essays in The Boston Globe, Essence, and Newsweek. She received the 2006 New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Playwriting and Screenwriting, and was a recent writing resident at the Royal Court Theatre. Her play, Hoodoo Love, received the Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award. Hall is currently working on a new play called Hurt Village, the second installment of her Memphis-set triptych. She received her B.A. in African-American studies and creative writing from Columbia University, and her M.F.A. in acting from Harvard University.Cecil Woods, Jr. Award for Nonfiction
Roy Reed is author of an inclusive biography of Governor Orval Faubus and was a renowned writer and reporter for the Arkansas Gazette and The New York Times. He also taught journalism for 16 years at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Reed was born in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and received his bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism at the University of Missouri. He spent much of his tenure at The New York Times covering issues that concerned the South. In 1986 he published Looking for Hogeye, a collection of essays about the South. His biography, Faubus: The Life and Times of an American Prodigal, was a 1997 New York Times Notable.
