James Baker Hall Book Award
Recipients
2024
2025
2026
2027
Award for Poetry
Greg Pape, Judge
“Wesley Houp has a way of sketching a scene or telling a tale so that the imagined backstory, what isn’t said but lurks just outside the poem’s words, carries the emotion and meaning and keeps resonating. Emily Dickinson said, ‘Tell all the truth but tell it slant.’ The poems in Strung Out Along the Endless Branch seem to follow that advice. It is a book of poems with its own charmed, often fabulous (in the sense of fable-like) way of evoking and presenting contemporary realities and absurdities, garbled politics, drugs, dangers and divisions of all sorts, but also, the rich particulars, characters, and daily wonders of this world. It is a pointed, yet tender, pasquinade or satire, moving, thought provoking, insightful, funny, heartbreaking.”
—Greg Pape
Finalists:
Zachary Johnson
Melissa Helton
Lisa Jensen
Wesley Houp, Winner
Strung Out Along the Endless Branch
Award for Short Fiction
Toni Ann Johnson, Judge
“Willie Davis has crafted an exquisite and engrossing collection of linked stories, set in Hazard, Kentucky, that unfold over the course of one long day after a car accident kills a resident and a member of a traveling troupe of circus clowns. These characters are wonderfully well-drawn. Flawed and funny, odd, and wounded, striving and defeated, we get to know them well enough to root for them as individuals and as people who care for each other more than they realize. Readers will be moved, entertained, and delighted by the depth of love evoked for the characters and the place they live. It’s a remarkable read.”
—Toni Ann Johnson, author of But Where’s Home?
Finalists:
Award for Creative Nonfiction
Award for Poetry
