Congratulations to our friends Peter Matthiessen and Mark Doty, who each picked up a National Book Award at the ceremony in New York last night. Matthiessen, who also won the award in 1979 for The Snow Leopard, was honored in the fiction category this year for Shadow Country. The now-definitive overhaul of his so-called Everglades trilogy was cited by the judges as a "masterpiece" and "an epic of American rise and descent." Doty, our keynote speaker this past January, received the committee's esteemed award for poetry for his Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems. The NBA citation calls Doty a "master" whose work conveys "ferocious compassion."

Visit our podcasts page to hear Doty's 2008 keynote address, and his reading of several Key West-inspired poems. To see and hear Matthiessen reading from Shadow Country, visit the Seminar in person this January.

We are delighted to announce the winners of our three named scholarships. April Puciata has been awarded the Scotti Merrill Memorial Scholarship; Martha Otis has received the Joyce Horton Johnson Fiction Award; and Patricia Engel has won the Marianne Russo Scholarship.

The annual scholarships are given by the Key West Literary Seminar to recognize excellence in a manuscript submission from a new or emerging writer. They provide full tuition to our 2009 Seminar and writers' workshop program, financial support for travel, lodging, and living expenses while in Key West, and an opportunity to appear onstage at the Seminar. We are sincerely grateful to Joyce Johnson, The Dogwood Foundation, and The Rodel Charitable Foundation-Florida for the endowments which will continue to make these scholarships possible for years to come.

April Puciata, a poet, lives in New York City. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New York Quarterly, New Orleans Review, Salamander, Mangrove, and Salonika. This will be her fifth visit to Key West and her first to the Seminar. Martha Otis lives in Miami and first visited Key West two years ago with her daughter. She teaches writing at the University of Miami and has published fiction in Best New American Voices 2000, the Indiana Review, and Moment Magazine. Patricia Engel also lives in Miami; she learned about the Seminar last year and attended a few of our free-and-open-to-the-public events. Her fiction has been published in Harpur Palate, Driftwood, Slice, and the Boston Review (here and here). In 2007, Engel was selected by Junot Díaz as Featured Emerging Fiction Writer at CLMP's "Periodically Speaking" at the New York Public Library.

Congratulations to April, Martha, and Patricia. We look forward to meeting you this January in Key West.

We're pleased to announce the theme for our 2010 Seminar. Clearing the Sill of the World, from January 7 - 10, will be a celebration of 60 years of American poetry in honor of our longtime friend Richard Wilbur. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, National Book Award winner, and former Poet Laureate of the United States, Wilbur has, in his distinguished career, received virtually every award available to a poet. Our title comes from a line in his poem, "The Writer," which you can see on our home page for the 2010 Seminar. We've begun to assemble an excellent cast of poets for the event, and will be announcing their names in the weeks and months to come.