Two Yaddo Authors are NBCC Finalists

Two Yaddo writers – Tony Hoagland and Caryl Phillips – are among the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards for the publishing year 2003, it was announced Monday.

Mr. Hoagland was nominated in the poetry category for his disarming and witty collection What Narcissism Means To Me (Graywolf), which The New York Times said “has the appeal of a mean-but-funny friend, a smart aleck you can’t dismiss...” A Distant Shore (Knopf), Mr. Phillips’s haunting novel about two desperate, displaced people, was nominated in the fiction category. A critic for The Library Journal applauded A Distant Shore as “a poignant and quietly powerful portrait of contemporary alienation.”

Another Yaddo artist, the late fiction writer Richard Yates, is the subject of a nominated book, Blake Bailey’s acclaimed A Tragic Honesty:  The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador), a finalist for the NBCC biography/autobiography award.

Nominees will read from their works 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 3, at the New School, 66 West 12th Street, New York, New York. The reading and the awards ceremony – to take place Thursday, March 4, also at the New School, are free and open to the public. Tickets are still available for a gala reception celebrating the NBCC’s 30th anniversary. The gala will follow the March 4 awards ceremony; tickets are $40 per person.

The NBCC is a non-profit organization comprised of 600 book editors and critics nationwide. It was founded in 1974 to improve the quality of book criticism in all media and to create a way for critics to share professional concerns. For more information, including a complete list of this year’s NBCC nominees and winners from previous years, visit the NBCC Website at bookcritics.org.