News and Events

2009 Fiction and Poetry Winners

WWPH is pleased to announce the winners of its 2009 fiction and poetry contests.

Calvin, a novel by William Littlejohn, won the fiction prize and will be published on October 15, 2009.
In the summer of 1940, ten-year-old Billy Smithson’s headstrong and capricious mother abducts Billy from her former husband’s home and leaves the boy with her father in Athena, South Carolina. The boy’s grandfather, in turn, delivers the boy into the care of the title character, Calvin, an African-American servant. What happens over the summer and the months to follow is explored in spare but evocative prose. For more information, visit William Littlejohn's author page.

From the Fever-World, a poetry collection by Jehanne Dubrow, won the poetry prize and will also be published on October 15, 2009. Set in the invented Polish town of AlwaysWinter and written in the voice of the nonexistent Yiddish poet, Ida Lewin, this collection is an extended meditation on Eastern European Jewry in a world before Auschwitz. Transgressive, erotic, and rooted in the experience of the senses, Fever-World is the result of Dubrow’s research of Yiddish literature, oral histories, and testimony, which she completed while serving as a Sosland Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies in Washington, DC. For more information, visit Jehanne Dubrow's author page.

For more information on WWPH's annual fiction and poetry contests, visit our Become an Author page.

News and Reviews

Jane Satterfield's new book, Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter, 2009) was featured in Library Journal's May 1st article, "Short Takes: Memoirs for the Beach, Backwoods, or Flu Bunker," in a list of this summer's featured memoirs, or "the new novels." The article can be accessed at libraryjournal.com.

Brandel France de Bravo won the 2009 Larry Neal Writers' Award in poetry given by the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Submissions by local youths, teens, and adults (both amateur and professional writers) were judged by professionals in four literary genres: poetry, short story, essay, and dramatic writing.

David Taylor's Success: Stories was reviewed by storySouth Magazine in their Spring 2009 issue. Reviewer Jennifer Julian writes: "these stories lure you in and turn on you; standing on familiar ground, something far more mystifying pushes itself up from the terrain." The article can be accessed at storysouth.com

David Taylor took part in a panel on short fiction at the Virginia Festival of the Book in March, where he read from Success: Stories, winner of the 2008 WWPH fiction competition. A program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Book Festival is the largest literary gathering in the Mid-Atlantic region. Programs include readings, book signings, a children's StoryFest day, and panels and workshops on publishing, book clubs, and freelancing.