Meet Your 2007 National Book Award Winners

By Ron Hogan on November 15, 2007 8:00 AM

From left to right:

⇒Robert Hass, whose acceptance speech for Time and Materials offered generous and detailed praise for all of the other poets nominated in his category: “I feel a little bit rude that I’m up here and they’re not,” he concluded.

⇒Cindy Johnson, accepting the fiction award for Tree of Smoke on behalf of her husband, Denis Johnson, who’s on assignment writing a magazine feature in Iraq; in response to “rumors” that he took the assignment to get out of attending the ceremony, she quipped, “That is only partly true.” She then opened an envelope marked “Just In Case” and read from her husband’s prepared thank-you note.

⇒Sherman Alexie, who thanked Adrian Louis for writing the line of poetry that made him want to be a writer (“I am in the reservation of my mind”), and Ezra Jack Keats for writing The Snowy Day. In addition to thanking Little, Brown for publishing his YA novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Alexie was awesome enough to thank his “adult” publishers, Morgan Entrekin and Elisabeth Schmitz, as well as former Grove Atlantic publicist Judy Hottensen.

⇒Tim Weiner won the nonfiction award for his CIA history, Legacy of Ashes, and made a point of thanking everybody at the Doubleday table by name, especially for taking his manuscript and turning it around into a finished hardcover in just two weeks. He also expressed gratitude that “our democracy is still open enough to see a glimpse of what we’ve wrought abroad.”