2011 National Book Awards Finalists Announced; John Lithgow to Host Ceremony

The 2011 National Book Awardsfinalists have just been announced. The Winners in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, and Young People's Literature will be announced at the 62nd National Book Awards Benefit Dinner and Ceremony at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City on Wednesday, November 16. Actor, writer, and musician John Lithgow will host the event. Poet John Ashbery will receive the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, to be presented by poet Ann Lauterbach. Mitchell Kaplan, co-founder of the Miami Book Fair International, will receive the Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Contribution to the American Literary Community, to be presented by writer Walter Mosley.

John Lithgow is a star of stage, television and movies. He is also a composer and performer of children's songs, and has written six books for children, including I'm a Manatee, I Have Two Dogs, and Marsupial Sue. His most recent book is a memoir titled, Drama: An Actor's Education.

The full list of finalists is as follows:

FICTION
Andrew Krivak, The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press)
Téa Obreht, The Tiger's Wife (Random House)
Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic (Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House)
Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision (Lookout Books, an imprint of the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington)
Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones (Bloomsbury USA)

NONFICTION
Deborah Baker, The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism (Graywolf Press)
Mary Gabriel, Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution (Little, Brown and Company)
Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (W. W. Norton & Company)
Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention(Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin Group USA)
Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE
Franny Billingsley, Chime (Dial Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, Inc. )
Debby Dahl Edwardson, My Name Is Not Easy (Marshall Cavendish)
Thanhha Lai, Inside Out and Back Again (Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)
Albert Marrin, Flesh and Blood So Cheap: The Triangle Fire and Its Legacy
(Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books)
Lauren Myracle, Shine (Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS)
Gary D. Schmidt, Okay for Now (Clarion Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

POETRY
Nikky Finney, Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly, an imprint of Northwestern University Press)
Yusef Komunyakaa, The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Carl Phillips, Double Shadow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Adrienne Rich, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (W.W. Norton & Company)
Bruce Smith, Devotions (University of Chicago Press)

Photo Credit: Walter McBride/WM Photos