The twenty-one finalists for the 2011 National Book Award were announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting Wednesday morning. They include Téa Obreht, Lauren Redniss, Yusef Komunyakaa and Gary D. Schmidt. There is a healthy mix of nominees from large and small presses with Bellevue Literary Press, publisher of last year's Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers, receiving a fiction nomination for Andrew Krivak's The Sojourn.
The nominees are as follows:
Fiction: Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press); Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife (Random House); Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (Knopf); Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books); Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA).
Nonfiction: Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf Press); Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown and Company); Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton & Company); Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (Viking Press); Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books).
Poetry: Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly); Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Carl Phillips, Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton & Company); Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press).
Young People's Literature: Franny Billingsley, Chime (Dial Books); Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy (Marshall Cavendish); Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again (Harper); Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy (Knopf); Lauren Myracle, Shine (Amulet Books); Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now (Clarion Books).
The finalists were announced on Oregon Public Broadcasting's morning radio program, Think Out Loud, in front of a live audience at the new Literary Arts Center in Portland, Ore. The winners will be announced on November 16.
