A Bit of Nat’l Book Award Trivia, Semi-Resolved

Last week, at the National Book Awards ceremony, I wondered aloud if Jim Shepard and Joshua Ferris represented the first teacher-student pair to wind up on the same shortlist. Shepard was sure that it must have happened in the poetry category before, and I’m still contemplating carving out a block of time when I might actually look for an answer to that, but in the meantime Gwenda Bond emailed to remind me about the 2006 shortlist for young people’s literature: M.T. Anderson, who won the prize for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party, was one of Martine Leavitt‘s advisors at Vermont College when she was working on her MFA in writing for children, which is where she started writing the story that became Keturah and Lord Death.

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