A Hollins alumna and a current member of the university faculty are among the acclaimed authors who have been named to Longlists for this year’s National Book Awards.
Sally Mann ’74, M.A. ’75 is one of ten contenders for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction. She has been nominated for her work, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. One of America’s most renowned photographers, Mann has previously received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her photographs are held by major institutions internationally. Her many books include Second Sight (1983), At Twelve (1988), Immediate Family (1992), Still Time (1994), What Remains (2003), Deep South (2005), Proud Flesh (2009), and The Flesh and the Spirit (2010).
Cited for her short-story collection Refund, Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing Karen E. Bender is on the Longlist for the National Book Award for Fiction. She is the author of the novels Like Normal People and A Town of Empty Rooms, and her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, Ploughshares, Story, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and other magazines. She has won two Pushcart Prizes and grants from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught creative writing at Antioch University Los Angeles, the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, and Tunghai University in Taiwan.
The National Book Award is one of the nation’s most prestigious literary prizes. Previous winners include Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, James McBride, Joyce Carol Oates, and Adrienne Rich.
Finalists will be announced on October 14.
