September 10, 2019
CHAPEL HILL, NC – The Crook’s Corner Book Prize, awarded annually for the best debut novel set in the American South, has announced its Shortlist today. The winner will be chosen this year by National Book Award-winning novelist, Charles Frazier. The $5000 prize, inspired by the prestigious book awards given by famous Parisian literary cafés, is co-sponsored by the iconic Southern restaurant, Crook’s Corner, in Chapel Hill, NC.
“No one has a tougher time getting published and gaining recognition than first-time novelists,” says Anna Hayes, president of the Crook’s Corner Book Prize Foundation. “Our goal is to offer a timely boost to new talent.”
Although eligible books must be set predominantly in the South, the prize is open to writers from anywhere.
THE SHORTLIST
The Atlas of Reds and Blues
by Devi S. Laskar
(Counterpoint Press)
In a time-bending mind-flash as she lies bleeding from a police gunshot wound, the protagonist of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, known only as Mother, revisits her life as a successful immigrant to America from India. Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, N.C. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York, an MA in South Asian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in journalism and English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sugar Land
by Tammy Lynne Stoner
(Red Hen Press)
In the Midland, Texas of 1923, a girl who falls in love with her best (girl)friend seeks sanctuary in the safest place she can think of, working at the Sugar Land Prison for men. Against the background of Texas from Prohibition through the civil rights era, she weds the prison warden, befriends legendary blues singer Leadbelly, and searches for the key to her own prison. Tammy Lynne Stoner was born in Midland, Texas and has been published in two dozen journals and anthologies. She is also the publisher of Gertrude, the longest consecutively published queer journal.
Lot: Stories
by Bryan Washington
(Riverhead Books)
Bryan Washington’s Houston, Texas doesn’t mention much about oil or pickup trucks. It’s about today’s Houston, a sprawling and multiethnic city in which a vibrant underclass is bouncing, sliding, and shooting the rapids of the American system as its people try to make a home in it. Family, community, love, work, and the human connections that make a life are Washington’s subjects. A resident of Houston, his fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Style Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Boston Review, Tin House, and more. He’s also the recipient of an O. Henry Award.
The winner will be announced on January 6, 2020. About the book prize.
Media contacts: Cindy Hamel at Cindy Hamel PR 917-544-1793 or cindyhsellars@gmail.com.
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Margaret Wilkerson Sexton’s A Kind of Freedom, published by Counterpoint Press, is the winner of the sixth annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize for best debut novel set in the American South. This year’s judge was award-winning author Tayari Jones, who described the book as “an eye-opener, page-turner, and heart-breaker.”
A Kind of Freedom follows the downward spiral of an African-American family in New Orleans, from the 1940s through Hurricane Katrina. The family, anchored by a respected physician and his Creole wife, had occupied the upper echelons of black society in the city. But as each generation journeys through the 1980s and finally to the post-Katrina world, family members – despite never-extinguished hope – succumb to drugs and seemingly implacable futility.
Sexton, whose African-American grandfather and six of his children graduated from college, wanted to know why the following generations struggled even as it became possible for a black man to become President. “I wondered what systems took the place of Jim Crow in my generation,” she says. “I wanted to demonstrate the extent to which the current laws surrounding housing, drugs, and sentencing were as powerful as laws enforcing racial segregation in the 1940s.”
The New York Times review of the book declared, “For a debut novelist to take up such charged material is daring; to succeed in lending free-standing life to her characters without yielding an inch to sentimentality . . . announces her as a writer of uncommon nerve and talent.”