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FINALISTS FOR THE 2003 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY

Carol Muske-Dukes, Sparrow: Poems (Random House, Inc.)
Written in the wake of personal tragedy, Sparrow grapples with one of the fundamental concerns of elegy: the contrast between love and grief. The poet finds the image of a flitting sparrow as the most fitting answer. Ghosts - from Lear to Godot to Oscar Wilde - haunt the brooding verse but also announce the promise of revival even in the face of the most heartbreaking loss.

Poet, novelist, and essayist Carol Muske-Dukes is the founder and director of the graduate program in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her column "Poet's Corner" appears regularly in The Los Angeles Times and she also contributes reviews to The New York Times. A 1981 Guggenheim Fellow, Ms. Muske-Dukes lives in Los Angeles with her daughter.

Charles Simic, The Voice at 3:00 A.M.: Selected Late and New Poems (Harcourt Inc.)
This anthology presents selections from Charles Simic's last eight books alongside 19 new poems. The quatrains with which Mr. Simic are most associated are coupled with free verse to relate profound contrasts realized through striking poetic imagery. Weighty, metaphysical concerns are addressed with sardonic wit and clear-mindedness. Compiled without section breaks, the collection presents the full scope of the poet's arc, with work spanning two decades.

A National Book Award Finalist for Poetry in 1978 for Charon's Cosmology and in 1996 for Walking the Black Cat, Charles Simic is the author of more than 60 books. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1986 and 1987. Born and raised in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, he was witness to aerial bombardments by both Nazi and Allied forces. He immigrated to the United States in 1954 and received his B.A. from New York University in 1967. A translator, editor, essayist, and poet, Mr. Simic is a Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, Durham, where he has taught since 1973. He served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2000-2002.

Louis Simpson, The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001,
(BOA Editions, Ltd.)
The struggle with day-to-day American life, set against the backdrop of larger and weightier social issues, takes center-stage in this collection. The earlier poems, which concern themselves primarily with the experience of the World War II soldier, balance morbid subject matter with rhyme and metrical rhythms, while the later work is characterized by even-lined, unrhymed verse. Read chronologically, the collection is a tale of increasing self-knowledge and personal discovery.

The son of a Scottish lawyer and Russian mother, Louis Simpson was born in Jamaica, West Indies in 1923. After immigrating to the United States at 17, Mr. Simpson studied at Columbia University and served active duty in the 101st Airborne Division. Returning from the war, he completed his studies at Columbia and then moved to France, where he published his first book of poems, The Arrivistes (1949). Mr. Simpson went on to write a novel, an autobiography, memoirs, literary criticism, and 18 volumes of poetry. Mr. Simpson was a National Book Award Finalist in 1964 for At The End of the Open Road, which won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1966 for Selected Poems, and in 1973 for Adventures of the Letter I. He lives in Stony Brook, New York.

C.K. Williams, The Singing: Poems (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Although most of the poems in this collection deal with topics associated with aging - the loss of loved ones, fleeting memories of childhood, and love of grandchildren - the tone is reflective rather than strictly backward looking. Events from the past function as reference points upon which to base an assessment of the present, not intended as hard and fast answers, but instead as tools for developing an informed perspective.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1936, C.K. Williams was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. He began his career as a poet in the early 1960s, and has gone on to write numerous works, including Repair, a National Book Award Finalist in 1999 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Mr. Williams teaches in the creative writing program at Princeton University, and divides his time between Princeton and Paris.

Kevin Young, Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf / Random House, Inc.)
From Blues to Dixieland to Ragtime, early 20th-century American popular music serves as a stylistic and thematic model for the poems in this collection. The poet limits himself to short verses, often of only two lines, complementing his urgent and highly personal subject matter while lending melodic vocal attributes to the verse. The collection infuses decades-old American lyric formulas with contemporary diction and vernacular, and, in so doing, recasts the past in the most contemporary of terms.

A 2003-2004 Guggenheim fellow and Ruth Lilly Professor of Poetry at Indiana University, Kevin Young has written two previous books of poetry, Most Way Home (1995) and To Repel Ghosts (2001), which is based upon the work of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. His poetry and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Callaloo; and he also edited the acclaimed Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers. In 2001, Mr. Young was the writer-in-residence for the National Book Foundation's week-long Family Literacy Project at James Monroe Campus Schools in the South Bronx.

FINALISTS FOR THE 2003 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION

Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (Doubleday / Random House, Inc.)
Created in 1918 following the Russian Revolution, the Gulag was the vast and brutal system of Soviet concentration camps through which some 18 million prisoners passed until the camps' ultimate collapse in the glasnost era of the mid-1980s. Long ignored by historians, it was not until Alexander Solzhenitsyn's book The Gulag Archipelago (1972) that Soviet labor camps first entered public consciousness. Drawing from both survivor testimonies and access to long-sealed Soviet archives, Gulag: A History is the first comprehensive scholarly examination of day-to-day life in the labor camps and the Gulag's place in 20th century history.

After graduating from Yale University, Anne Applebaum studied as a Marshall Scholar at the London School of Economics and St. Anthony's College, Oxford. She began her work as a journalist in 1988 as the Warsaw correspondent for The Economist. Her first book, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe, is an account of a journey through Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus as the countries were making their final moves toward independence. After living more than 15 years in Europe, Ms. Applebaum joined the editorial board of the Washington Post in 2002. She now lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, a Polish politician and writer, and their two children. www.anneapplebaum.com

George Howe Colt, The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home (Scribner / Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
With its bay windows, sloped roofs, and jutting gables, the four-story, 11-room "Big House" on a barren peninsula in Cape Cod, is a venerable landmark. Built in 1903 by George Howe Colt's great grandfather, the summer house became the emotional epicenter for generations of the Colt Family. When the house must be sold, the author returns one last time to reflect upon the 42 summers he spent there. Mr. Colt interweaves memories of his own time spent at the house with the history of those who inhabited it generations ago, revealing layer upon layer of family life, love, grief, and heartache.

George Howe Colt is a former staff writer at Life magazine and has written for The New York Times, Civilization, and Mother Jones. He is the author of one previous work of nonfiction, The Enigma of Suicide (1992). Mr. Colt is married to Anne Fadiman, who is the editor of the cultural quarterly The American Scholar. They live in rural western Massachusetts with their two children.

John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press / Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
Published on the 40th anniversary of the 1963 Civil Rights March on Washington, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin is the first detailed examination of the man responsible for that seminal event. Bayard Rustin exhibited charismatic leadership and courage in the early days of the civil rights movement, inspired tens of thousands, and mentored Martin Luther King, Jr., in the principles of nonviolent protest. Yet his name is not accorded the same honor as others in part because, author John D'Emilio argues, he was the victim of American attitudes toward homosexuality during his lifetime.

John D'Emilio was born in New York and received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University in 1982. He currently is serving a five-year term as Director of the Gender and Women's Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, Mr. D'Emilio's previous books include The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture and Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970. He lives in Chicago.

Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press / Simon & Schuster, Inc.)
Noted religion scholar Carlos Eire's idyllic and privileged childhood in Havana came to an end in the wake of Castro's revolution. In this memoir, he reveals an exotic, magical Cuba and an eccentric family: his father - a municipal judge and art collector - believed that in a past life he had been King Louis XVI. In 1962, Carlos Eire's world changed forever when he and his brother were among the 14,000 children airlifted off the island, their parents left behind. In chronicling his life before and after his arrival in America, Mr. Eire's personal story is also a meditation on loss and suffering, redemption and rebirth.

Born in Havana, Carlos Eire fled to the United States at the age of 11. He is currently the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, where he has been a faculty member since 1996. An authority on religious reformations, faith, and spiritualism in modern Europe, Mr. Eire lectures widely, and is the author of From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain and War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin, and co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife and their three children.

Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (Crown Publishers / Random House, Inc.)
The 1893 World's Fair in Chicago was the embodiment of a nation racing anxiously toward the 20th Century. Set against this backdrop, The Devil in the White City is the story of two men who pushed their personal visions to the limit: Daniel H. Burnham, architect of the "White City" around which the fair was built, and Henry H. Holmes, a maniacal serial killer who murdered scores of Chicagoans by luring them to his "World's Fair Hotel," a complex full of torture devices. By juxtaposing these widely disparate lives, the author exposes the dark side of a glittering era.

Erik Larson grew up in Freeport, Long Island and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Russian history and from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He has written for many newspapers and national magazines, and has published three previous works of nonfiction, Isaac's Storm, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun, and The Naked Consumer. He lives in Seattle with his wife, their three daughters, and a host of pets.

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