Bianca Stone, Caren Beilin, Kathryn Davis, and Zoë Tilley Poster have won the 2022 Vermont Book Award, a prize established in 2014 to honor outstanding literary work by Vermont authors.
This year’s judges — made up of writers, readers, editors, librarians and booksellers of Vermont — chose the winners in poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and children’s literature from among 14 total finalists for work published in 2022.
Miciah Bay Gault, coordinator of the Vermont Book Award, said she hopes Vermonters will read the books awarded this year, describing each winning work as “truly exceptional.”
“What I want people to understand about these books, books that win awards like this, is that they’re written with such precision (and) really exquisite care for every word,” Bay Gault said. “The order of the words, the music of the sentences, the deftness of the images — I just feel like these are books that expand our sense of ourselves in the world. They are extraordinary books.”
The winners were honored Saturday in a reception hosted by Vermont Humanities at Vermont College of Fine Arts. As participants sipped a custom-made cocktail, appropriately named “the unreliable narrator,” last year‘s awardees — Alison Bechdel, Melanie Finn and Shanta Lee Gander — and National Book Award winner M.T. Anderson announced the prizes.
Bianca Stone, poetry
Stone, the author of the poetry collections “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows” and “The Möbius Strip Club of Grief,” won in the poetry category for her latest collection, “What is Otherwise Infinite” (Tin House, 2022).
“I deal only in the hardest pain-revivers, symbols and tongues,” Stone writes in the book, which Publisher’s Weekly called an “incisive” and “tender” collection that “addresses the wayward heart of modern society.”
“I want to tell you only / in the intimacy of our discomfort.”
Stone, whose poems, poetry comics and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review and Brooklyn Rail, is also the creative director for The Ruth Stone House, a literary nonprofit in Vermont.
In a tweet on Monday following the ceremony, Stone wrote that she was “blown away by all the love” she received following her online announcement of her Vermont Book Award win.
“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,” Stone said at Saturday’s ceremony, according to Bay Gault. “How we do this, in poetry, is its mysterious power.”
Caren Beilin, fiction
Beilin, a southern Vermont based writer of “Blackfishing the IUD,” “Spain,” “The University of Pennsylvania,” and “Americans, Guests, or Us,” won the Vermont Book award in the fiction category for her most recent novel, “Revenge of the Scapegoat” (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2022).
Beilin’s winning novel tells the story of Iris, an adjunct professor at a city arts college who receives a package of scathing letters through which her estranged father blames her for their family’s crises.
In an interview with VTDigger, Beilin said the book could be described as a work of autofiction.
“I don’t really experience a specific separation between myself and the character,” she said. “But I never am being faithful to myself (in writing). I don’t really have a lot of faith in there being something to be faithful to. I mean, I’m such a various thing, as we all are.”
Beilin talked about receiving a similar package from her own father at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, which she described as the catalyst for the writing that followed.
“My therapists, my friends, everybody, said, ‘you have to burn these, you have to burn these letters,’” Beilin said, describing the aftermath of her father’s package, “and I said, ‘I’m gonna burn them into a novel.’ … It became a way to move these really damaging letters into a space (of) comedy, of play, of absurdity.”
As a relatively new Vermonter who moved to Bennington in 2020, Beilin said that winning the Vermont Book Award is an “incredible way to feel like more embedded and welcomed into the state.”
“You win something like this and it just gives you a … different kind of firmament,” Beilin said. “You’re brimming with a different kind of ground.”
Kathryn Davis, creative nonfiction
Davis, the author of eight acclaimed novels, won the Vermont Book award in creative nonfiction for her memoir, “Aurelia, Aurélia” (Graywolf Press, 2022), her debut in the genre.
In what The New York Times called a “time-shuffling” book “fixated on metamorphoses and thresholds,” Davis writes about the death of her husband, Eric Zencey, who died of cancer in 2019, offering a meditation on mortality and contradiction. According to a review in The Rupture, Davis “haunts this memoir with the idea of haunting.”
“But you don’t have to leave the house,” she narrates in the book, speaking to Eric before he goes, “You could haunt it.”
A resident of Montpelier, Davis spends winters at Washington University in St. Louis, where she is the Hurst writer in residence.
Zoë Tilley Poster, children’s literature
Poster, a writer and artist from central Vermont, won the award for children’s literature for her debut picture book, “The Night Wild” (Penguin Random House, 2022), becoming the first winner in the category, which was newly included in the Vermont Book Awards this year.
Penguin Random House called it a “stunningly illustrated” debut “about a dog’s fantastical moonlit adventure and wild new friendship.”
In the story, a Society of Illustrators Original Art 2022 Silver Medal winner, Poster’s protagonist, Dog, ventures out into the moonlight to meet Wolf, a new friend with whom Dog adventures until dawn. The black-and-white illustrations — created with pencil, graphite powder, and eraser — bring Poster’s story to life and “glow with starlight,” according to American Library Association magazine Booklist.
“Luminescent illustrations and dramatic storytelling turn one night of moonlit play into an exceptional story,” the School Library Journal said of Poster’s debut.
“I love getting to see how excited authors are on the day their books come out,” said Eliza Prescott, who works at Phoenix Books in Burlington and attended the ceremony on Saturday, “so I enjoyed seeing all the Vermont authors being recognized and celebrated for their stories.”