Ruth Stone, In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon Press)
For her eighth volume of poetry, Ruth Stone, an octogenarian Vermonter, writes from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman, and in doing so, reveals a fiery passion for knowing exactly how the world works.

Born in Roanoke, Virginia in 1915, Ruth Stone is the author of seven books of poetry, including In an Iridescent Time (1951), Topography and Other Poems (1970), and Cheap (1972), as well as several chapbooks. She is the recipient of many honors including the Academy of American Poets Eric Mathieu King Award, the Whiting Award, the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the State of Vermont, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. She raised three daughters alone while teaching creative writing at colleges and universities across the United States, including University of Illinois, University of Wisconsin, Wellesley College, Indiana University, Brandeis, and SUNY Binghamton, where she is professor emerita. She lives in Vermont.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, Shadow of Heaven (W.W. Norton & Company)
With titles such as "Winter Field," "The Garden, Spring, the Hawk," and "Autumn in the Yard We Planted," nature infuses these poems and sequences written by a poet determined "to bring out-doors inside, /The natural and the wild, picked by my own hand."

Born in Virginia in 1943, Ellen Bryant Voigt grew up on a farm and, from an early age, was a serious student of the piano. She attended Converse College and the University of Iowa. She was the recipient of the 2002 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has taught at Goddard College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and now teaches in the low-residency MFA Program for writers at Warren Wilson College. The Vermont Symphony Orchestra on its 2000 tour premiered a commissioned work based on her previous book Kyrie. She lives in Cabot, Vermont, and is currently Vermont State Poet.

FINALISTS FOR THE 2002 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

Mark Costello, Big If (W.W. Norton & Company)
In a riff on recent history and the American obsession with assassination, five Americans - bodyguards and soccer dads and campaign volunteers - long for security in the crowds and in their own lives. At the center is the story of Vi, a secret service bodyguard protecting the Vice President campaigning for the White House, and her troubled brother, a software genius poised to make a fortune on "BigIf," a state-of-the-art computer game.