Three Vermont poets and a cartoonist have won the 2023 Vermont Book Awards, the state’s highest literary prizes, which were presented at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier on Saturday, May 4.
Poet Sandra Simonds won the fiction award for her debut novel, Assia; former Vermont poet laureate Mary Ruefle won in the creative nonfiction category for her volume of prose poems titled The Book; and poet Vievee Francis won the poetry honor for The Shared World.
Cartoonist, artist and educator Dan Nott was presented with the children’s literature award for his debut nonfiction graphic novel, Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day.
The prizes, administered by the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Vermont Humanities and the Vermont Department of Libraries, recognize works by
Vermont authors published in 2023. Each winner received $1,000 and a light-up, whimsical sculpture — different for each category — created by Wolcott artist Trevor Corp.
The author of eight books of poetry and an instructor at Bennington College, Simonds loosely based her debut novel on the life of Assia Wevill, a German Jew who escaped Nazi Germany and whose affair with Ted Hughes broke up his marriage to Sylvia Plath. In 1969, Wevill killed herself and her child in what is widely viewed as an attempt to copy Plath’s famous suicide.
“Lending a contemporary feminist perspective to an unrecognized chapter in modern literary history, Assia is a novel that asks us to hold our judgment and to consider the personal and political histories of people who commit unthinkable acts,” writes the book’s publisher, Noemi Press.
Simonds thanked the small publishing house during the awards ceremony, noting that it publishes works by authors who are queer and people of color. “It’s a press that really, really tries to celebrate difference,” Simonds said. Assia belonged there, she said, “And I’m very, very grateful that they took a chance on this book, because a lot of people rejected it.”
Bennington poet and essayist Ruefle set out to mail copies of her favorite poems to 1,000 Vermonters after she was named poet laureate in 2019, she told Seven Days at the time. She discards handwritten drafts of her own poems, she said, and she’s “clueless about what they are when they begin.”
Ruefle, whom Publishers Weekly dubbed “the patron saint of childhood and the everyday,” has published 23 volumes. Her 2019 book of poetry, Dunce, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and on the longlist for the National Book Award.
Her 2023 collection “is demurely entitled The Book,” Jim Schley noted in a review for Seven Days. “But the contents are bristling with surprises, as the poet orchestrates collisions between divergent topics and perspectives.”
Ruefle was unable to attend the Vermont Book Awards ceremony, but Simonds read remarks Ruefle had prepared: “I would like to thank everyone in this room for being a reader of one author or another, for whether you read or whether you write, you are engaged in carrying on a long tradition built on the idea of what it is like to be a human in the past, the present and the future.”
Accepting her award, Francis expressed gratitude for Vermont. She was born in Texas, the last state to free its slaves, she noted. “And all my life, I wanted to live in Vermont,” she said. “Well, if I couldn’t get to Canada …
“But being in Vermont,” she continued, “the first state to rid us of the scourge that was slavery, finally being here, this feels like acceptance.”
Francis, an associate professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth College, lives in White River Junction. Her third collection, Forest Primeval (2015) won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award.
“Francis’ literary style could be called omnivorous,” Schley wrote in Seven Days last year. “She has read widely, and the echoes of older poetics, such as those of Shakespeare, William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, are audible in her work, alongside and entwined with rhythm-and-blues cadences … Her reader hears an exuberant playfulness with syllables, words and clauses, even when a poem is thematically very serious.”
Nott holds a master of fine arts degree from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, where he now teaches. He has released two comic books with the school: This is What Democracy Looks Like: A Graphic Guide to Governance and Freedom and Unity: A Graphic Guide to Civics and Democracy in Vermont. Nott runs White River Junction-based Parsifal Press, a micropress for comics and other objects, with his partner, Daryl Seitchik.
“I started Hidden Systems with a pretty small question I was thinking about: What do we see when we picture the internet?” Nott said in his acceptance speech. He expanded the book to include the electric grid and waterworks. “So Vermont might not be the most obvious place to write a book about infrastructure,” he continued. “You’re actually providing me with perspective that I could have easily missed during my years living in cities.”
Hidden Systems was named to the National Book Award longlist and has been honored by the National Science Teaching Association, National Council of Teachers of English and the American Booksellers Association.
“A lot of explainer comics can be dense and not engaging,” Center for Cartoon Studies cofounder James Sturm told Seven Days in 2019, “but Dan can find the poetry in what he’s trying to communicate.”
Fourteen authors were Vermont Book Awards finalists. CNN national political correspondent Eva McKend, a former anchor at WCAX-TV, gave the keynote address at the awards ceremony. Good writing reminds us of our humanity, McKend said. “We see ourselves on the page. We see ourselves at our worst and at our best, who we want to become and who we want to — at all costs — avoid becoming. “
Alice Dodge contributed reporting.
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This article appears in May 8-14, 2024.
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