Book & Paper Awards
ASLE has established book and graduate student paper awards in the areas of ecocriticism and environmental creative writing; the first awards were given at the 2007 Biennial Conference held at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. The most recent awards were given at the 2009 conference held at the University of Victoria, BC, Canada.
The next ASLE book awards will be presented at the biennial conference, June 21-26, in Indianapolis. Those awards will be for books published by ASLE and affiliated members in 2009 and 2010. We do not anticipate that the guidelines for the 2011 awards will differ signficantly from those of previous years (see 2009 guideline link below for details). The deadline for submission is January 14, 2011. Updated information will accompany the conference call for papers and other publicity, and will also be posted here. If you would like to submit your book early, three copies should be sent to:
Tom Lynch
ASLE Awards
Department of English, 202 Andrews Hall
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
P.O. Box 880333
Lincoln, NE 68588-0333
2009 Book Awards Submission Information
2009 Graduate Studen Paper Awards Submission Information
2009 Award Winners Announced
GRADUATE STUDENT SCHOLARLY PAPER
WINNER
Andrew Husband, Sam Houston State University
for "Postcolonial 'Greenery': Surreal Garden Imagery in Nuruddin Farah's Maps"
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Tristan Sipley, University of Oregon
Paul Huebener, McMaster University
Virginia Kennedy, Cornell University
Judges:
Joni Adamson, Arizona State University
Richard Kerridge, Bath Spa University
Serenella Iovino, University of Torino, Italy
GRADUATE STUDENT CREATIVE PAPER
WINNER
Emily Carr, University of Calgary
for "eve / in exile: the poem as ecotone"
HONORABLE MENTION
W. Mark Giles, University of Calgary
Judges:
Harriet Tarlo, Bath Spa University
Scott Knickerbocker, College of Idaho
Mark Tredinnick, University of Sydney
SCHOLARLY BOOK AWARD
Judges:
George Hart, California State University, Long Beach
Patrick Murphy, University of Central Florida
Sara Spurgeon, Texas Tech University
WINNER
Paul Outka, Florida State University
for Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance
The 2009 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment Award for ecocriticism goes to Paul Outka’s 2008 Race and Nature from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance. The judges felt this study makes a tremendously important contribution to ecocriticsm through the sophisticated way that it addresses the intersection of race and nature and attends to both African American and white American writers. As one judge noted, white writers have often been treated in a purely laudatory fashion with little attention paid to the issue of race—especially their race. Outka’s book begins with a discussion of the racialized nature of the sublime, connects transcendentalism, abolition, and the pastoral, moves chronologically through slavery, reconstruction, “Strange Fruit,” and white flight. The judges concluded the book makes good use of literary theory with a strong historical context, and while the number of genuinely outstanding books made this a difficult decision, concluded that Outka’s Race and Nature, as Gretchen Legler wrote, “has the potential to change ecocritical scholarship, and perhaps even American environmental thinking, for the better,” allowing us to “begin to embrace the true complexity of the American landscape.”
HONORABLE MENTION
Ursula Heise, Stanford University
for Sense of Place, Sense of Planet
CREATIVE BOOK AWARD
Judges:
Andrew Wingfield, George Mason University
Gretchen Legler, University of Maine, Farmington
Ann Fisher-Wirth, University of Mississippi
WINNER
Elizabeth Dodd, Kansas State University
for In the Mind's Eye: Essays across the Animate World
"The world offers innumerable bridges from the inner to the outer realms, avenues of transcendence or narrow passages from one mode of being to another." So says Elizabeth Dodd at the end of In the Mind's Eye: Essays across the Animate World.
Her book is a collection of such bridges, avenues, and narrow passages, though it's strange to use the word "narrow" in association with work of such dazzling breadth. Whether studying cave paintings in southern France, hiking out to petroglyphs in the American Southwest, paddling among old growth cypress trees in North Carolina, or gathering mushrooms in the woods along the Kansas River, Dodd enriches first-hand accounts of her journeys with researched information from a wide range of scholarly sources and delights the reader with sudden leaps of her artful imagination.
What animates all of these essays is the author's keen interest in actual places and in the images humans-- our contemporaries, our early ancestors, and those in between--have used to convey their experiences of these places. Dodd's voice, assured and assuring, never wavers. She tells her stories and unfolds her elegant ideas in prose that is supple, learned, sometimes lyrical, sometimes witty, and always entirely apt.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Jennifer Atkinson, George Mason University
for Drift Ice
Barbara Hurd, Frostburg State University
for Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains
John Price, University of Nebraska, Omaha
for Man Killed by Pheasant
2007 Book Award Winners
To read in more detail about the awards, see the article in the Fall 2007 ASLE News.
Ecocritical Work: Robert N. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance (U Penn P).
Creative Writing: Gretchen Legler, On the Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station, Antarctica (Milkweed).
2007 Graduate Student Paper Award Winners
Scholarly Paper: Jill Gatlin, University of Washington, “Landscapes and Lungs: Toxicity, Space, and Race in Hubert Skidmore’s Hawk’s Nest."
Creative Writing: Flannery Scott, Western Illinois University, “The Highest Places.”