VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

After much reading and discussion, the First Novelist Committee has chosen three superb novels as finalists for the 2013 award:

No One Is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel

When Captain Flint Was Still A Good Man by Nick Dybek

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman

The winner of the 2013 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award will be announced in early July.

This year we had a record-breaking number of submissions, nearly 140 first novels in all.  After many months of reading and reviewing, we have finally narrowed the selection to 14 semifinalists.

We’d like to thank all of those who submitted to the award last year, and also, all of our wonderful volunteer readers in the VCU English Department, the James Branch Cabell Library, and the Richmond literary community.

Without further ado, the 2013 semifinalists are….

Congrats to Paula Champa, VCU MFA alum, for publishing her first novel!  Grab a copy of “The Afterlife of Emerson Tang” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) at your nearest bookstore!

In our third interview of our ongoing series, we catch up with 2011 Cabell First Novelist winner, David Gordon, and ask a few questions about his first novel, The Serialist.  We also learn a bit more about his upcoming second novel, Mystery Girl, which will be released in July 2013 (Thomas & Mercer).  Receiving critical acclaim across the board, including a starred review from Booklist, The Serialist tells the story of Harry Bloch, a freelance writer whose life takes a sudden horrific turn after he agrees to write the memoir of death-row inmate, Darian Clay (aka The Photo Killer).

Interview was conducted by former MFA fiction student, Tom Batten, during Tom De Haven’s First Novelist Seminar, Fall 2011.  Additional questions about Mystery Girl were recently asked via email by First Novelist coordinators.

How long did it take you to write the novel? How many drafts did you go through?

The whole process took about two years including revisions with my editor. I don’t know how many drafts really. A lot. I want to say maybe seven or eight before I sold it and then several more after. Ten? Also I tend to pull out individual parts and re-do them very intensively, like say taking the carburetor out of a car and rebuilding it then putting it back, driving around the block, taking out the radiator, etc. So yes, a lot of revising. (more…)

Valley Haggard is the moderator for this year’s VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, which celebrates Justin Torres’s first novel, “We the Animals.”  She is the founder and director of Richmond Young Writers, a year round program for students, and teaches creative nonfiction workshops and retreats for adults. She served as Style Weekly’s book editor from 2004-2011, sat on the board of the James River Writers from 2008-2011, has written regularly for various publications and currently has a monthly column in Belle, Style’s Magazine for Women. (more…)

In 2007, Justin Torres was honored with the Lambda Literary Fellowship, an intensive workshop experience that helped inspire and create his first novel, We the Animals.  Check out LLF’s interview with Justin to learn more about his experience as an emerging first novelist.

We are happy to share with you our second interview in our new series, featuring Jean Thompson, author of The Woman Driver.  Her latest novel, The Year We Left Home (Simon and Schuster, 2011) is being called “unforgettable,” “masterful,” and “nothing short of brilliant,” and was recently praised in the New York Times Book Review‘s Great Pulitzer Do-Over column.  Thompson is the critically acclaimed author of the short story collections Do Not Deny Me, Throw Like a Girl, and Who Do You Love (a National Book Award finalist), as well as two recent novels, City Boy and Wide Blue Yonder.

Interview was conducted by MA English student at VCU, Jim Crawford, during Tom De Haven’s First Novelist Seminar, Fall 2011. (more…)

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Cabell First Novelist Award last year, professor and author Tom De Haven held a weekly seminar in which graduate students read and discussed the debut novels of various popular authors. The goal of the course was to explore and examine the unique creative process of each novelist, and also to compare the different themes, styles, and writing techniques in their first novels.  Many of the students contacted these authors by email or phone with questions, and received insightful and inspiring responses.

With the launch of our new blog, what better time than now to share these exciting interviews?  We are proud to present you with the first of our new and ongoing series, an exclusive interview with Donna Tartt, bestselling author of The Secret History.

Your first novel, The Secret History, has reached its twentieth anniversary this year.  How do you see and remember your first novel today?

I was studying classical civilization and philosophy at the time I was writing The Secret History, and hence was really wrapped up in the background material before I wrote a word of the novel.   I began writing it when I was nineteen—the first scene I wrote, actually, was the characters in the car coming home on the way from Bunny’s murder (which, in the book as it is now, is about halfway through.) (more…)

The National Book Foundation has named Justin Torres a recipient of their “5 under 35” Award!

Now in its seventh year, the celebration honors five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists.  Congrats Justin!