Thursday, April 26, 2007
Arts Award in Today's Washington Post
When Scott Reynolds Nelson set out to write "Steel Drivin' Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend," he couldn't have dreamed his book would win the National Award for Arts Writing.
For one thing, the award hadn't been invented yet.
For another, "arts writer" is not the category into which Nelson would most naturally seem to fall. He's a professor of history at Virginia's College of William & Mary whose last book was "Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence, and Reconstruction."
That didn't stop him from being delighted to win the $15,000 award, which is designed to encourage writing unburdened by academic jargon.
Read the whole article by Bob Thompson from today's Washington Post here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/25/AR2007042502665.html
