National Book Awards 2011

The 62nd National Book Awards were held in New York City last night, with awards going to Thanhha Lai for Inside Out and Back Again (Young People's Literature), Nikky Finney for Head Off and Split (Poetry), Stephen Greenblatt for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Nonfiction), and Jesmyn Ward for Salvage the Bones (Fiction). In Inside Out & Back Again (Harper) a 10-year-old Ha, whose young life is changed when the Vietnam War comes to her home of Saigon, flees when Saigon falls, and starts a new life with her family in Alabama. Salvage the Bones is about a looming hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, and the twelve-day framework around it.