American Woman Academics Named Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards

Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced. Awards are given out in six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Five finalists are chosen in each category. The winners will be announced on March 17 at a ceremony at the New School in New York City.

Several of the finalists are women who currently hold academic posts at American colleges and universities.

Elizabeth Alexander is the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. Professor Alexander has been a member of the faculty at Yale since 2000. She previously taught at the University of Chicago. Professor Alexander is the author of six collections of poetry. She is being honored in the autobiography category for her book The Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing, 2015). Professor Alexander is a graduate of Yale University. She earned a master’s degree at Boston University and a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania.

Charlotte Gordon is a finalist in the biography category for her book Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015). Dr. Gordon is an associate professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. A native of St. Louis, Dr. Gordon is a graduate of Harvard University, where she majored in English and American literature. She holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing and a Ph.D. in literature from Boston University.

Vivian Gornick teaches creative writing at the New School in New York City. During the 2014-15 academic year, Gornick was the Bedell Distinguished Visiting Professor in nonfiction at the University of Iowa. Gornick is the author of 11 books including her most recent The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) that is nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the autobiography category.

Margo Jefferson is a professor of writing in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and a professor at the Eugene Lang College of The New School for Liberal Arts in New York. She is nominated in the autobiography category for Negroland (Pantheon, 2015). She won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism while writing for The New York Times. Professor Jefferson is a graduate of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and holds a master’s degree from Columbia University.

Ada Limon was nominated in the poetry category for her collection Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015). The book is her fourth published collection of poetry. Limon, a native of Sonoma, California, serves on the faculty of the low residency master of fine arts program at Queens University of Charlotte and teaches for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She earned a master of fine arts degree in poetry from New York University.

Maggie Nelson is a finalist in the criticism category for her book The Argonauts (Graywolf Press, 2015). She is the only woman nominated in the criticism category. She teaches writing at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Before joining the faculty of CalArts in 2005, Dr. Nelson taught literature and writing at Wesleyan University, the Pratt Institute of Art, and the New School. Dr. Nelson holds a Ph.D. in literature from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.