D.C. Authors Are National Book Award Finalists

You'd think that, once the Almighty found himself on the business end of God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens' latest broadside, there'd be hell to pay. Instead, Hitchens' book became an international bestseller, racking up laudatory reviews and garnering an even larger audience for his witty contrarianism. Which makes one suspect that perhaps The Hitch is on to something.

As if it needed more attention, yesterday God Is Not Great was named one of five finalists for the National Book Award for nonfiction, awarded every year by the National Book Foundation. Hitchens, as most of us know, is a Washington, D.C. institution, living and working only a stone's throw from the nightlife in Adams Morgan. But he isn't the only writer representing the locals in the Awards.

Of the four categories (Nonfiction, Fiction, Poetry and Young People's Literature), local writers were nominated in three. In fact, area writers dominated the Nonfiction category. Of the five writers nominated, two were from D.C. proper. Besides God Is Not Great, the nominating committee also chose Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, the writer's expose on some Langley, Virginia-based government agency (hint: not the Turner-Fairbank Highway Research Center). Also nominated was University of Richmond (well, regional, if not "local") professor Woody Holton's Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, which details "the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate."

In the Poetry category, the it's-about-time nomination goes to University of Maryland at College Park professor (and director of the Creative Writing program) Stanley Plumly, selected for his latest collection of poems, Old Heart. And we're probably going to be hearing a lot more from local writer M. Sindy Felin, whose novel, Touching Snow, nominated in the Young People's Literature category, is also her first. Rather impressive.

Winners of the National Book Award will be announced November 14.