On August 22, at a Borders Books and Music store in New York City, NBC weatherman Al Roker announced the nominees for the second annual Quill Book Awards. The prizes, given in nineteen categories for adult and children's literature, are sponsored by NBC Universal Television Stations and Reed Business Information. The public will determine the winners by voting at the Quill Web site. The awards, which carry no cash value, will be handed out at a televised ceremony on October 10 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
The nominees in poetry are Amazing Peace: A Christmas Poem by Maya Angelou (Random House), Good Poems for Hard Times by Garrison Keillor (Penguin), New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver (Beacon Press), Still Another Day by Pablo Neruda (Copper Canyon Press), and The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems by Billy Collins (Random House).
The nominees in general fiction are Black Swan Green by David Mitchell (Random House), A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore (William Morrow), The March by E. L. Doctorow (Random House), Suite Française by the late Irene Nemirovsky (Knopf), and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Algonquin Books).
The nominees in biography/memoir are Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival by Anderson Cooper (HarperCollins), Marley and Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan (William Morrow), Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee by Charles J. Shields (Henry Holt), The Tender Bar by J. R. Moehringer (Hyperion), and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (Knopf).
The nominees in the debut author category are William Alexander for $64 Tomato (Algonquin Books), Julie Powell for Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (Little, Brown), Raymond Khoury for The Last Templar (Dutton), Debra Dean for The Madonnas of Leningrad (William Morrow) and Mike Leonard for The Ride of Our Lives: Roadside Lessons of an American Family (Ballantine Books).
