Now that it's official, I can finally tell the world that I have, on my fifteenth try (yes, I've been applying since 1993), been awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. While I would certainly have liked to have received one earlier, this fellowship could not have come at a time when I needed it more, as my medical bills for my cancer treatments and surgeries have been mounting at a frightening rate.

I keep looking at the list of Fellows on the Guggenheim Foundation web site to confirm that my name is still there. Sometimes the world does give one what one needs when one needs it. Just not very often...

Say what you will about this conference, it’s the one I look forward to every year. And I hope to see you there. I’m on two panels this time around, and I’ll spare you the details. I’d rather promote other happenings, like the annual Con Tinta Pachanga, one of the many off-site events made possible because the Chicano/Latino writers wanted to have a community space of their own during this reunion-at-large of writers. All are welcome.

Just returned from the party at City Lights Bookstore. You can check out the finalists for the other categories at the National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass, but since I’m on both the NBCC board and on Harriet, I thought I’d post the poetry finalists here.

Congratulations to poets Nikki Giovanni, Gregory Pardlo, and Tracy K. Smith. They are finalists for the first annual Essence Literary Award in the category of Poetry. Their books are: Acolytes by Nikki Giovanni; Totem by Gregory Pardlo; and Duende by Tracy K. Smith. All three books are exceptional, and I urge you to read them.

Essence Magazine, founded in the late 1960s, a fashion, lifestyle and entertainment magazine originally geared towards African American women, the first of its kind to do so, has long supported and featured African American writers in its pages and through its annual fiction-writing contest. The Essence Literary Awards comes at an important time, in which, educators, politicians, and parents should stress the importance of literacy, as all indicators and federal reports suggest reading is promptly becoming an obsolete activity of American life.

I just received my copy of Priscilla Sneff’s debut poetry collection O Woolly City published with Tupelo Press, the same press that graciously picked up my second collection Other Fugitives and Other Strangers. As many poets know, these two titles were two of about five left in publication limbo after the downfall of our original publisher Zoo Press.

It’s interesting to read the recent posts by Kwame and Kenny talking about first books and prizes (or the lack thereof). It makes me wonder what percentage of first books published each year are attached to contests. I’m glad that Kenny pointed out that a number of first books do get published each year outside the mainstream. (Is “mainpuddle” more appropriate?)

Thursday night, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize nominees were announced . . . in New York. The poetry finalists are:

• Erin Belieu for Black Box (Copper Canyon Press)
• Adrian C. Louis for Logorrhea (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press)
• Thom Satterlee for Burning Wyclif (Texas Tech University Press)
• Frederick Seidel for Ooga-Booga (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
• Michael Waters for Darling Vulgarity (BOA Editions)