2024 | Seven Days

Vermont authors Margaret Draft, Emma Hunsinger, Lucy Ives and GennaRose Nethercott have won the 2024 Vermont Book Award. The winners of Vermont’s highest literary prize were announced on Saturday at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.

Each wins $1,000 and a cowbell trophy created by Walden master jeweler and metal artist Nikki Ibey. The prize, administered by the Vermont Department of Libraries and Vermont Humanities, was given in four categories for work published in 2024.

Draft won the poetry prize for her debut collection, Nowhere Was a Lake; Hunsinger won the children’s literature award for her first published graphic novel, How it All Ends; Ives won the creative nonfiction award for her collection of essays An Image of My Name Enters America; and Nethercott won the fiction prize for her short story collection Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories.

The winners were selected from a field of 15 finalists.

Seven Days reviewer Jim Schley called Draft’s Nowhere Was a Lake an “extraordinarily accomplished first book.” Her words “are muscular and flexible,” Schley wrote, and she uses the spaces between lines and stanzas “for temporal, tonal and narrative leaps,” he continued. “Draft’s method is to convey enormity with brevity and restraint.”

The New York Public Library included the collection on a list of favorite poetry books of 2024, writing, “In a voice deceptively pragmatic, Draft writes poetry set within pastures, dive bars, abandoned bars, bedrooms, and the headlines of missing persons. These pared, often devastating works contemplate emotional coexistence in a quiet, observant way.”

When the Nerd Daily asked Hunsinger to describe How it All Ends in five words, the Norwich cartoonist chose: rowdy, genuine, cartoony, sunny and irreverent.

Best-selling author Alice Oseman called the middle-grade graphic novel “a whirlwind dive into the chaotic imagination of a tween experiencing her first crush,” while two-time National Book Award finalist Eliot Schrefer deemed it “imaginative and hysterical, and with the sort of rare clear-seeing honesty that will make any reader feel less alone in the world.”

Hunsinger has an MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction. Her comic story “How to Draw a Horse” appeared in the New Yorker and was nominated for an Eisner Award.

Creative nonfiction winner Ives is a novelist, poet and an assistant professor of literary arts at Brown University. Her five interrelated essays in An Image of My Name Enters America explore identity, national fantasy and history as Ives examines events and records from her own life to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored.

In its “Best Books of 2024” roundup, Vulture called the work “part criticism, part personal essay, part intellectual jubilation” and “the most inventive and exciting work of nonfiction this year.”

In Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories, Nethercott “has found shrewd ways of kneading together the weird capriciousness of folk myths, monster fables and ghost tales,” reviewer Schley wrote for Seven Days. Most of the collection’s 14 pieces aren’t shaped like stories in the usual sense of the term, Schley continued. “Rather, many of them are montage-like assemblages with minimal narrative, more akin to prose poetry.”

Magical realism, with its ability to mend the dissonance between the real world and one’s perceived reality, is the thread that ties the stories together, Nethercott told NPR in 2024. “When I write a story, I essentially think of it as taking the human experience and turning the volume knob up,” she said. For example, a person with a broken heart continues to walk through the world and see it unchanged, she said. “In magical realism, if a person is experiencing grief, you can have their entire body shatter into a thousand pieces.”

Author, educator and environmentalist Bill McKibben gave the keynote address at the award ceremony.

The Vermont Book Award was created in 2015. Books by writers who live in Vermont for at least six months of the year are eligible as long as their work is not self-published. A panel of judges, composed of writers, booksellers, librarians, educators and other supporters of literature named the 15 finalists and selected the winners.