It’s LitQuake week, the Booker Prize was just announced, and at City Lights this morning, the finalists for the National Book Award were announced by Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Unfortunately, none Three of the 20 nominees, spread among 4 categories (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s literature) live in Northern California.
Correction: I originally posted that none of the nominees live in northern California, but the SF Chronicle story has it this way:

The Bay Area was well represented in 2006 with three local writers. Fremont native Gene Luen Yang was nominated in the young people’s literature category for “American Born Chinese” — the first graphic novel to be nominated. Berkeley’s Ben Lerner is a poetry finalist for “Angle of Yaw,” as is Santa Cruz poet Nathaniel Mackey for “Splay Anthem.”

I apologize to readers. But when I searched the online bios for all the writers, it seemed none of them lived in the area.

According to this bio on the Ploughshares magazine site, “Ben Lerner is from Topeka, Kansas.” There’s no mention of him living in Berkeley. I found no location information for Gene Luen Yang. And I guess I just didn’t look hard enough for Nathaniel Mackey.

So congrats to these folks!