BTW News Briefs

Dave Eggers Selected to Receive Heinz Award 

On September 12, bestselling author Dave Eggers, the founder of inner-city writing laboratories for youth and a publishing house for emerging writers, was named the recipient of the $250,0000 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. The Heinz Awards are presented in five categories -- Arts & Humanities, Environment, Human Condition, Public Policy, and Technology -- to Americans whose "achievements have helped expand human understanding, spur innovation, and enhance the world's capacity to sustain itself."

In addition to the $250,000 award for their unrestricted use, recipients are presented with a medallion inscribed with the image of the late Sen. John Heinz on one side and a rendering of a globe passing between two hands on the other. The Heinz Awards, which were created by Teresa Heinz-Kerry to honor the memory of her late husband, will be presented at a private ceremony on October 22 in Pittsburgh.

SCIBA Holding L.A. Area Museum Store Tour

On Saturday, September 29, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association will be holding a Los Angeles Area Museum Store Tour, beginning at the Norton Simon in Pasadena. At each stop, a docent or store manager will discuss the exhibits at the museum, a docent will lead a tour of an exhibit, and participants will have a chance to browse. Lunch will be served at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Stops include:

• Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens: The Huntington is celebrating the centennial of its Desert Garden. A docent will be greeting the tour to discuss the garden and conduct a tour;

• Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Carol Norcross, author of Flowers of Hannah Borger Overbeck, guest curator and museum store buyer, will discuss the production of Flowers of Hannah Borger Overbeck and its corresponding exhibit;

• Hammer Museum: Complimentary admission to browse the galleries and the museum store; and

• Norton Simon Museum: Tourists will learn about Norton Simon, the collector and the focus of the Norton Simon Museum from a professional lecturer at the Norton Simon.

Quills Winners Announced

On September 10, the Quill Book Awards, in conjunction with Reed Business Information (RBI) and the NBC Universal Television Stations, announced the 2007 Quill winners.

The Quill Debut Author of the Year Award winner is Diane Setterfield for The Thirteenth Tale (Atria). In the General Fiction category, the Quill Award will be given to Cormac McCarthy for The Road (Alfred A. Knopf). Quill Awards will also be presented to Amy Sedaris, Nora Roberts, and Walter Isaacson, among other authors, at a gala awards ceremony to be held on October 22 at Lincoln Center in New York City.

The event will be hosted by NBC's Ann Curry and Al Roker. Special guest Stephen Colbert tops the list of presenters, which also includes Tiki Barber, Lorraine Bracco, Tom Brokaw, Tina Brown, Mary Higgins Clark, Jonathan Groff, Brooke Shields, and Marlo Thomas, among others. For the first time in its three-year history, the Quills will make a limited number of tickets to the awards ceremony and gala reception available for purchase to the public.

The one-hour Quill Awards television special will be carried by the NBC Universal Television Stations and syndicated through NBC Universal Television Distribution to local markets nationwide on Saturday, October 27.

Brenda Shaughnessy Receives James Laughlin Award

On September 10, the Academy of American Poets announced that Brenda Shaughnessy's collection Human Dark With Sugar (Copper Canyon Press) had been chosen by poets Peter Gizzi, Matthea Harvey, and Caroline Knox as the recipient of the 2007 James Laughlin Award. Given to commend and support an American poet's second book of poetry, the Laughlin Award includes a $5,000 prize.

Shaughnessy's first book of poems, Interior With Sudden Joy, was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. She is the poetry editor at Tin House magazine and currently teaches creative writing at Princeton University and Eugene Lang College at the New School.

Rona Jaffe Foundation Celebrates 13th Annual Writers' Awards

The Rona Jaffe Foundation will honor its annual Writers' Awards winners at a ceremony on September 27 in New York City. Six emerging women writers have been singled out for excellence by the Foundation and will receive awards of $25,000 each. The 2007 winners are Elif Batuman, Sarah Braunstein, Robin Ekiss, Alma Garca, Jennifer Grotz, and Holly Goddard Jones. The program was created by novelist Rona Jaffe to identify and support women writers of talent and promise in the early stages of their writing careers.

The Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards are given to writers of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Most of the award winners have yet to publish first books, although they have each had some early attention for their work. They plan to complete their first books and make substantive progress on their next writing projects with the help of their Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Awards.