click to enlarge - Courtesy ©️ Seven Days
- The 2022 Vermont Book Award-winning books: The Night Wild by Zoë Tilley Poster, What Is Otherwise Infinite by Bianca Stone, Revenge of the Scapegoat by Caren Beilin and Aurelia, Aurélia by Kathryn Davis
Vermont authors Zoë Tilley Poster, Kathryn Davis, Caren Beilin and Bianca Stone have won the 2022
Vermont Book Award. The winners were announced on Saturday at a celebration hosted by
Vermont Humanities at
Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.
The award, which carries a $1,000 prize, was given in four categories for work published in 2022.
The award for children’s literature, new this year, went to Poster for her debut picture book,
The Night Wild, which she wrote and illustrated. Davis, the author of eight acclaimed novels, won the award in creative nonfiction for her debut nonfiction work, the memoir
Aurelia, Aurélia. Beilin received the award in fiction for her novel
Revenge of the Scapegoat, and the award in poetry went to Stone for
What Is Otherwise Infinite.
Last year’s Vermont Book Award winners — Alison Bechdel, Melanie Finn and Shanta Lee Gander — and author M.T. Anderson announced this year’s winners. A panel of judges, composed of writers, readers, editors, librarians and booksellers of Vermont, chose the winners from among 14 finalists.
Poster’s picture book chronicles the fantastical moonlight adventure of Dog, who slips away at night and makes an unexpected friend, Wolf. Together they explore the woods until morning beckons Dog home. Poster’s black-and-white illustrations, made with brushed-on graphite powder, pencil and erasure, “glow with starlight,” writes American Library Association magazine
Booklist.
Commenting on the Corinth author's book in Seven Days last year, Kristin Richland, children's book buyer at
Phoenix Books, said, “The night is mysterious and beautiful but also filled with adventure, making this a perfect bedtime story.”
click to enlarge - courtesy of Anne Davis ©️ Seven Days
- Kathryn Davis
Davis, who lives primarily in Montpelier, spends January through March at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is the Hurst Writer in Residence. Her eight novels “must be counted among contemporary American fiction's most idiosyncratically strange,” Jim Schley writes in his
Seven Days review of the most recent,
The Silk Road. In her memoir,
Aurelia, Aurélia,
Schley writes, Davis applies her “ability to find words to summon in a reader's mind her characters' weird specificities and the minutiae of physical locations” to her husband, writer Eric Zencey, who died of cancer in 2019. She also describes the “places they knew and loved together, including Montpelier's Hubbard Park.”
Beilin, the southern Vermont-based author of four other books, teaches writing and publishing at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. In
Revenge of the Scapegoat, Iris, an adjunct at a city arts college, receives a package of letters her father wrote to her in her teens, blaming her for their family’s crises. In an
interview with Bookforum magazine, Beilin said she has received a similar package. “I always say all writing is 100 percent nonfiction and 100 percent fiction. It’s just a 200 percent sort of situation,” Beilin said. “This book is a documentary fiction that uses some very particular personal artifacts to drive the plot.”
click to enlarge - courtesy of Daniel Schechner ©️ Seven Days
- Bianca Stone
Poet and visual artist
Stone lives in Brandon and is creative director of the Ruth Stone House, a literary nonprofit that supports poetry and creative arts.
What Is Otherwise Infinite, Stone’s fourth collection of poetry, “balances erudite philosophizing with razor-sharp imagery in poems that feel deeply relatable, personal and of our time,” reviewer
Benjamin Aleshire writes in Seven Days. “Part of what makes this book so fearless is how candidly the author acknowledges her fears and how vividly she describes concepts such as anxiety and pain.”
“To be a poet is to learn to speak. Of our own lives. Of reality. And have it mean something,” Stone remarked at the Saturday ceremony. “Every book I am lucky enough to make and share is an attempt to speak and listen to the world, to my life, and have it speak and listen to another person’s life.”
The Vermont Book Award was created in 2014 and “celebrates the long tradition of literature in the state,” its website says. Books by writers who live in Vermont for at least six months of the year are eligible as long as their work is not self-published. Three Vermont organizations run the prize in partnership: the
Vermont Department of Libraries, Vermont Humanities and Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Updated May 8, 12:25 p.m.