2012 Norman Mailer Center and the NCTE Awards
This year, Norman Mailer Center and Writers Colony and The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) award the Norman Mailer Writing Award in the categories of: High School Teacher Fiction Writing, High School Fiction Writing, Community College Fiction Writing, College Fiction Writing and College Poetry Writing. The Awards were presented at the Center's Fourth Annual Benefit Gala in New York City on Thursday, October 4, 2012. The College Fiction winner received a Mailer Fellowship to the Colony and a check for $10,000.00. The High School Teacher winner received a check for $10,000. The High School and Community College Fiction winners received checks for $5,000 each. The College Poetry winner receivesd a check for $5,000 and was sponsored by Van Cleef & Arpels. You can also view the results for the Muhammad Ali Award for Writing on Ethics below. See our Newsfeed for the winner, finalists and semifinalists results for all awards!
Norman Mailer Award for High School Teacher Fiction Writing Award
- Winner
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Kay McSpadden Why Women Moan in Bed York School District #1 Rock Hill, SC 
Kay McSpadden
Norman Mailer Award for High School Teacher Fiction Writing WinnerKay McSpadden is a National Board-certified English teacher in a high-poverty rural high school in York, S.C. This is her 35th year of going to work and facing teenagers, which proves that she is either brave or foolhardy. Her classroom is decorated with demotivational posters and pictures from Star Trek.
For the past 13 years she has contributed a regular column to the Charlotte Observer's op-ed page. In 2007, C.D. Stampley published a collection of her columns, Notes from a Classroom: Reflections on Teaching. In 2010, Stampley published her retelling of children's fables, A Child's Book of Virtues.
Kay and her husband Randy, a social worker and Presbyterian minister, have two sons: Jamie, who is in graduate school in Boston, and Will, who works in banking while studying game design.
- Finalists
Violet Turner
Wantagh High School
Mastic, NYMark Maxwell
Rolling Meadows
Evanston, ILJoan Malerba-Foran
Common Ground High School
Woodbridge, CTTess Callahan James
Newark Academy
Boonton, NJ
Norman Mailer Award for High School Teacher Fiction Writing Award Judges
Garrison Keillor
Author and Radio Host
Garrison Keillor is the host and writer of A Prairie Home Companion and The Writer's Almanac. He is also the author of more than a dozen books, including Lake Wobegon Days, The Book of Guys, and Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny. He was born in Anoka, MN, in 1942 and graduated from the University of Minnesota. He lives in St. Paul, MN with his wife and daughter.
Colum McCann
Author
Colum McCann is the author of five novels and two collections of stories. His most recent novel "Let the Great World Spin" won the National Book Award in 2009. He was nominated for an Oscar in 2005 for the short film "Everything in this Country Must," directed by Gary McKendry. Colum's work is published in over 30 languages.
Sigrid Nunez
Author
Sigrid Nunez has published six novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, and, most recently, Salvation City. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Among the many journals to which she has contributed are The New York Times, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Tin House, Conjunctions, and Threepenny Review. Her honors and awards include three Pushcart Prizes, a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature.
Norman Mailer Award for College Fiction Writing Award
- Winner
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Vincent Scarpa I Hope You're Wrong About Scottsdale Emerson College Boston, MA 
Vincent Scarpa
Norman Mailer Award for College Fiction Writing WinnerVincent Scarpa has recently completed his BFA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Baltimore Review, and Plain China: Best of Undergraduate Writing. he tweets at @vincentscarpa.
- Finalists
Brittany Bennett
Stanford University
Oceanside, CAMarina Keegan
Yale University
New Haven, CTRebecca Schultz
Yale University
New Haven, CTAlex Ryan Bauer
University of Iowa
Iowa City, IA
Norman Mailer Award for College Fiction Writing Award Judges
Barbara Lounsberry
Distinguished Scholar and Author
Barbara Lounsberry has worked closely with literary journalism pioneer Gay Talese, and edited with him Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Literature of Reality. Her own books include The Art of Fact: Contemporary Artists of Nonfiction, The Writer in You, and The Tales We Tell: Perspectives on the Short Story (co-edited with Susan Lohafer).
She served as Nonfiction Editor of The North American Review, the oldest literary magazine in the United States, from 2000 to 2003 and was a contributing editor to Keep it Real: Everything You Need to Know About Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction (2009). She is currently finishing a book on diaries: on Virginia Woolf’s luminous diary and the many diaries Woolf read. Lounsberry has written on Norman Mailer and is a member of the Mailer Society Board of Directors.
Lee Gutkind
Author and Editor
Lee Gutkind is founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary magazine to publish nonfiction exclusively, and Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. He is the author or editor of more than 20 books, including his highly praised “Almost Human: Making Robots Think” and the award-winning “Many Sleepless Nights. Gutkind has lectured to audiences around the world—from China to Australia to Africa and most recently, Egypt, where his creative nonfiction topics concerned, “Writing the Revolution.” A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Science Foundation, Gutkind is credited by Harper’s and Vanity Fair as a leading figure in the creative nonfiction literary movement.
Jay Parini
National Bestselling Author
JAY PARINI is a poet, novelist, critic and biographer. He is Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury College. He has published over twenty books, including Robert Frost: A Life, Promised Land: Thirteen Books that Changed America, and The Last Station, a novel about Tolstoy's last year that was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer. His recent novels include The Apprentice Lover and The Passages of H.M. His latest volume of poems is The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems.
Norman Mailer Award for College Poetry Writing Award
- Winner
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Kim Stoll If the Stars were Black, The Skies White Susquehanna University Selinsgrove, PA 
Kim Stoll
Norman Mailer Award for College Poetry Writing WinnerKim Stoll grew up along the muddy banks of the Perkiomen Creek in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. She attended Susquehanna University where she received her BA in Creative Writing the Spring of 2012. While there, she lived in a house with seven other writers, drank beers at the brewpub with her favorite professors, and generally enjoyed immersing herself in the ideal writing community SU provided. She is now continuing her education at the University of Arizona’s MFA program. She is trying to stay hydrated, coherent, and writing in the hot, bright Southwest.
- Finalists
Perry Hungerford
University of Montana
Missoula, MTElliot Smith
Penn State University – Erie
Erie, PAJessie Li
Davidson College
Davidson, NCAnne Pellicciotti
Alfred University
Alfred, NY
Norman Mailer Award for College Poetry Writing Award Judges
Meena Alexander
Poet, Mailer Writers Colony Fellowship Mentor
Meena Alexander is an internationally acclaimed poet, scholar and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sundan, Alexander lives and works in New York City, where she is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College int he MFA program in Creative Writing and at the CUNY Graduate Center in the PhD program in English. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, literary memoirs, essays and works of fiction and literary criticiam.
Among her best known works are the volumes of poetry Illiterate Heart and Raw Silk. In addition she has published two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music. Illiterate Heart won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award.
Ronaldo V. Wilson
Poet
Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is also a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry, Fiction and Literature in the Literature Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz. His latest book, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, is forthcoming from Counterpath Press in 2012.
Norman Mailer Award for Community College Fiction Writing Award
- Winner
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Edwin Reese Lost Cosmonauts St. Louis Community College - Meramec St. Louis, MO 
Edwin Reese
Norman Mailer Award for Community College Fiction Writing WinnerEdwin Reese was born and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. After failing to graduate high school, he kicked around for a while before enrolling at St. Louis Community College – Meramec, where he became the Editor-in-Chief for Currents, the campus literary magazine. He and his wife recently moved to Binghamton, New York, where he plans to continue his education.
- Finalists
Samantha Cameron
Montgomery College
Rockville, MDMarcial Rodriguez, Jr.
College of Lake County
Grayslake, ILTaylor Bush
Drexel University
Philadelphia, PAKatherine Smith
Sandhills Community College
Pinehurst, NC
Norman Mailer Award for Community College Fiction Writing Award Judges
Anne Fadiman
National Book Critics Circle Award
Anne Fadiman is the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale and the former editor-in-chief of The American Scholar.
Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, explored the cultural conflicts between a Hmong refugee family and their American doctors. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was described by the Washington Post as “an intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration.” Fadiman’s first essay collection, Ex Libris, is a book about books–from purchasing them, to reading them, to handling them (dog-earing the pages is permitted). Robert McCrum called it “witty, enchanting, and supremely well-written.” Fadiman’s most recent book is At Large and At Small, a collection of essays on topics ranging from Charles Lamb to ice cream (both objects of her passionate affection). The Christian Science Monitor called it “as close to a perfect book as you will ever hope to read.”
Ted Conover
National Book Critics Circle Award
Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. His other books include Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes, Whiteout, and most recently, The Routes of Man, about roads. Among the publications he contributes to are The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Conover is a distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.
Norman Mailer Award for High School Fiction Writing Award
- Winner
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Brittany Newell Bad Kids Interlochen Arts Academy Interlochen, MI 
Brittany Newell
Norman Mailer Award for High School Fiction Writing WinnerBrittany Newell (pen-name Ratty St. John) is a just-turned-legal naval-gazer hailing from the SF Bay. After almost two years of independent-study schooling, she was named the 2011 winner of the Int'l Virginia B. Ball Creative Writing Scholarship and whisked off to Northern Michigan to attend Interlochen Arts Academy for her senior year of high school. Other highlights of her cramped and clandestine artistic career include: being named a 2012 YoungArts Winner in Short Story; being named a national finalist in the 2011 Classical Singer competition; serving as a judge for two years running for the Brave New Voices International Poetry Festival; and volunteering for the Henry Miller Memorial Library in Big Sur, California. You can read her work in Polyphony & Metazen magazines, and catch her most every month at the nearest midnight screening of the Rocky Horror Picture Show as Riff-Raff. She will begin at Stanford University this September.
- Finalists
Cindy Li
Stuyvesant High School
New York, NYLisa Lee
Stuyvesant High School
New York, NYJoshua Kimelman
Millburn High School
Millburn, NJYasmin Belkhyr
Garden School
Astoria, NY
Norman Mailer Award for High School Fiction Writing Award Judges
Anne Fadiman
National Book Critics Circle Award
Anne Fadiman is the Francis Writer in Residence at Yale and the former editor-in-chief of The American Scholar.
Her first book, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, explored the cultural conflicts between a Hmong refugee family and their American doctors. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction and was described by the Washington Post as “an intriguing, spirit-lifting, extraordinary exploration.” Fadiman’s first essay collection, Ex Libris, is a book about books–from purchasing them, to reading them, to handling them (dog-earing the pages is permitted). Robert McCrum called it “witty, enchanting, and supremely well-written.” Fadiman’s most recent book is At Large and At Small, a collection of essays on topics ranging from Charles Lamb to ice cream (both objects of her passionate affection). The Christian Science Monitor called it “as close to a perfect book as you will ever hope to read.”
Ted Conover
National Book Critics Circle Award
Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. His other books include Rolling Nowhere, Coyotes, Whiteout, and most recently, The Routes of Man, about roads. Among the publications he contributes to are The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Conover is a distinguished writer in residence at the Arthur L Carter Journalism Institute of New York University.
The Muhammad Ali Writing Award for Ethics Award
- Winner
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Evin Hughes Float Like a Plane, Sting Like a Bomb: The Ethics of US Drone Attacks Georgia Southern University Swainsboro, GA 
Evin Hughes
The Muhammad Ali Writing Award for Ethics WinnerEvin Hughes is from Swainsboro, Georgia and currently resides in Statesboro, Georgia while attending Georgia Southern University. He is majoring in Writing and Linguistics and Information Technology. He is a member of Georgia Southern’s Arabic club and Amnesty International. Evin Hughes has published poetry in a local literary magazine called the Wiregrass.
- Finalists
Benjamin Ilany
Columbia University
New York, NYKatherine Van Winkle
Oregon State University
Corvallis, ORMagdalena Stuehrman
George Washington University Washington, DCEileen Eddy
Washington State University
Pullman, WA
The Muhammad Ali Writing Award for Ethics Award Judges
Dr. Elie Wiesel
Esteemed Author and Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 in Sighet, Transylvania. As a journalist and writer in France, he wrote a memoir Night, about his experience during the Holocaust. The book was published in 1956 in Yiddish, in 1958 in French and later translated into more than 30 languages.
Wiesel went on to write 57 books of fiction and non-fiction, including A Beggar in Jerusalem (Prix Médicis winner), The Testament (Prix Livre Inter winner), The Fifth Son (winner of the Grand Prize in Literature from the City of Paris), two volumes of his memoirs, All Rivers Run to the Sea and And the Sea is Never Full, and recently The Sonderberg Case.
For his literary and human rights activities, he has received numerous awards including the United States Congressional Gold Medal (1985) and the Medal of Liberty Award (1986); the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1992); the rank of Grand-Croix in the French Legion of Honor (2001); and an honorary Knighthood of the British Empire (2006).
When he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, the Norwegian Nobel Committee called him a "messenger to mankind", praising him for delivering a powerful message "of peace, atonement and human dignity" to humanity. Soon after, Marion and Elie Wiesel established The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
Dr. Wiesel continues to work for peace and human rights all over the world. He is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University, and also the Advisory Board chairman of the Algemeiner Journal newspaper.
Dr. Wiesel received the 2011 Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement, presented by Mortimer Zuckerman.
Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D
Director, Center for Ethics Education
Celia B. Fisher, Ph.D., Marie Ward Doty University Chair, Professor of Psychology and founding Director of the Fordham University Center for Ethics Education is a recipient of the 2010 Health Improvement Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Human Research Protection. She has chaired the Environmental Protection Agency’s Human Studies Review Board, the HHS Secretary’s Advisory Committee on Human Research Protections Subcommittee on Children’s Research, the American Psychological Association’s Ethics Code Task Force, the Society for Research in Child Development Common Rule Task Force and the NYS Licensing Board for Psychology. She authored Decoding the Ethics Code: A Practical Guide for Psychologists now in its third edition, 8 co-edited books and over 100 publications on ethics in science and practice.
Melissa J. Andris
Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, University of Louisville
Melissa Evans-Andris is a Professor of Sociology of Education and Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies in the College of Education and Human Development at the of the at the University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky. Her research focuses on school reform, sustainability of school improvement, and teacher quality. In 2010, she authored a book titled Changing for Good: Sustaining School Improvement. She is active in local, statewide, and national discussion forums related to school turnaround and reform.