Teacher-podcaster wins Emyl Jenkins Award
Valley Haggard is this year’s Emyl Jenkins Award winner, chosen by the nonprofit James River Writers to honor “an outstanding individual who, as Emyl did, inspires a love of writing and writing education in Virginia.”
Haggard, laid off in the 2008 financial crisis from her job at an alternative weekly in Richmond, founded Richmond Young Writers and an organization called Life in 10 Minutes, which gets participants to tell their stories in writing — by free-writing for 10 minutes and submitting that work for discussion. In addition to teaching, she and her colleagues produce a podcast.
She’s also written “Surrender Your Weapons: Writing to Heal” and “The Halfway House For Writers: A Life In Ten Minutes Handbook,” and published “Nine Lives,” an anthology of 10-minute works by 148 writers from beginning to professional.
Kwame Alexander, alum of Chesapeake’s Great Bridge High, has launched a kids’ literacy campaign with Follett, the bookstore chain, called All Books for All Kids.
He’s also got a new book, “Swing,” with Mary Rand Hess, about young kids struggling for hope, courage, and love, and finding their own voice. It’s already a New York Times best-seller. (Publishers Weekly)
Events: Pamela K. Kinney will sign copies of “Virginia’s Haunted Historic Triangle: Williamsburg, Yorktown, Jamestown, and Other Haunted Locations” and “Haunted Virginia: Legends, Myths and True Tales,” noon to 5 p.m. Saturday, Everything Williamsburg, 415 W. Duke of Gloucester St., Merchants Square. 757-565-8476.
Editors needed: The number of self-published books passed 1 million for the first time last year, reports Bowker’s, the group that provides ISBNs in the U.S. That was 28 percent more than in 2016 — which in turn was 8 percent more than in 2015. Since 2012, the number of ISBNs assigned to self-published titles has risen 156 percent. (Bowker’s, Publishers Weekly)
Great American Read will wind up Tuesday with a live broadcast (8 p.m., PBS) in which “America’s best-loved novel” is identified, after several weeks of voting. The 10 finalists (alphabetically speaking): “Charlotte’s Web,” the “Chronicles of Narnia” series, “Gone with the Wind,” the Harry Potter series, “Jane Eyre,” “Little Women,” the “Lord of the Rings” series, the Outlander series, “Pride and Prejudice” and “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
The Nobel Prize in Literature wasn’t awarded this year because of a sex abuse scandal in the organization that awards it, the Swedish Academy. In its place: the New Academy prize, to Guadeloupe’s Maryse Condé, a novelist who writes in French and is published in the U.S. Her works include “SEGU” and “Victoire: My Mother’s Mother.”
Obituary note: Robert Bausch, a Northern Virginia teacher and novelist whose works included “Almighty Me” (the root of the film “Bruce Almighty”) and “A Hole in the Earth”; he was 73.
New and recent
From Haruki Murakami, “Killing Commendatore,” another of the author’s considerations of middle age (Knopf. 704 pp.). Here, a painter’s wife has just left him, and he seeks to reinvent himself: as an artist, not as the portraitist he’d become. “As is often the case in Murakami’s fiction,” writes Charles Finch, “a plot of relative simplicity — an artist’s reinvention — is disrupted by enigmatic, surreal or violent incidents,” such as characters emerging from paintings. “His characters want to turn themselves inside out, to escape the indecipherable mechanical momentum of their lives.” (Washington Post)
“The Escape Artists: A Band of Daredevil Pilots and the Greatest Prison Break of the Great War” by Neal Bascomb. A true story from World War I. Soldiers and airmen of this war had no training in escape, Bascomb says; this 1918 episode and others were the basis of such training for later wars. He tells the story of Allied pilots imprisoned at Holzminden in Germany — a camp for the escape-prone — and how they dug their tunnel, forged identity papers, sewed civilian suits and German uniforms, and more. Nineteen were caught; nine made it 150 miles to the Dutch border. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 310 pp.)
From William F. Rogers of Virginia Beach, “The Penitent Spy,” a fictional narrative of a man who fled anti-Semitic persecution in the Sudetenland in 1938 and joined the CIA — then eventually became disillusioned by
U.S. policies on, and the agency’s work in, Central and South America. Rogers, a longtime and now retired CIA analyst, wrote the book with David T. Lindgren. (Page Publishing, 202 pp.)
Also: Nicholas Sparks, “Every Breath” ... Mitch Albom, “The Next Person You Meet in Heaven” (sequel to “The Five People You Meet in Heaven”; skewered by The Post’s Ron Charles as absurdly sentimental, gooey and devoid of meaning).
For the week ended Oct. 13, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide.
— Publishers Weekly