Minnesota presses were well-represented during National Book Critics Circle Award ceremonies Thursday night in New York City. Emilie Buchwald, founder and publisher emeritus of Milkweed Editions in Minneapolis, received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and Mary Jo Bang, published by Graywolf Press in St. Paul, won the award for poetry.
Bang's "Elegy," written as she mourned the death of her adult son, was praised as "musically virtuosic, fearlessly revealing, and achingly sad." Author Ken Kalfus, who introduced Buchwald, lauded her legacy of more than 1 million books in print, including the "massive contract" she bestowed upon him.
Other winners: Fiction: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," by Junot Diaz (Riverhead).
General nonfiction: "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present," by Harriet Washington (Doubleday).
Autobiography: "Brother, I'm Dying," by Edwidge Danticat (Knopf).
Biography: "Stanley: The Impossible Life of Africa's Greatest Explorer," by Tim Jeal (Yale).
Criticism: "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century," by Alex Ross, (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
A full list of finalists is at www.bookcritics.org.
