Prairie Schooner announces 2010 book prize winners

Prairie Schooner, the literary quarterly of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, has announced the winners and runners-up for its annual awards for books of short fiction and poetry. The winners were chosen from more than 1,100 submissions from around the world.

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for 2010 goes to Greg Hrbek of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., for his manuscript, "Destroy All Monsters." He will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Hrbek has received fellowships from the University of Iowa, the Michener Copernicus Society, Princeton University, and the NEA/Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission. His novel "The Hindenburg Crashes Nightly" was awarded the James Jones First Novel Award by the James Jones Literary Society. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called the book "a subtle, inventive, moving portrayal of contemporary angst shared and suffered by a cast of exasperatingly real and perversely likeable characters."

His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2009, Harper's Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Idaho Review, Sonora Review, Salmagundi, The 2007 Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories, and the Bridport Prize 2006 (United Kingdom). He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award in Fiction. He has taught fiction writing at Vassar College and Butler University, and he was distinguished visiting writer at Boise State University in 2002. Since 2001, he has been Writer-in-Residence at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, where he lives with his wife, son and daughter.

The winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for 2010 is James Crews of Portland, Ore., for his manuscript, "The Book of What Stays." He will receive a $3,000 prize and publication by the University of Nebraska Press. Crews was born and raised in St. Louis and attended Webster University where he studied with the current poet laureate of Missouri and alien abduction-expert, David Clewell.

His chapbook, "What Has Not Yet Left," won the 2009 Copperdome Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press and will be published later in 2010. He is the author of two other chapbooks as well -- "Bending the Knot" (Gertrude Press Chapbook Prize) and "One Hundred Small Yellow Envelopes: A Poem After the Life and Work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres" (Parallel Press). His poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2006 and 2009, basalt, Columbia, Prairie Schooner, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review and other journals. Last year, Crews was the recipient of the Bernice Slote Emerging Writers Award from Prairie Schooner. In December he will be a writer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, working on a second book, titled "The Thousandfold Consent of Things and Animals."

The Prairie Schooner competition, in its eighth year, runs Jan. 15 to March 15 annually. Submission details and a list of past winners are available online at http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/prizes/index.html.

Founded in 1927, Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at UNL. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays and reviews by beginning, mid-career and established writers. For more information, visit http://prairieschooner.unl.edu.

WRITER: James Engelhardt