Erica Trabold, a visiting assistant professor of creative writing at Sweet Briar College in Virginia, has been selected to receive the 2019 Nebraska Book Award in the nonfiction essay category. The awards ceremony will take place on Saturday, November 9, at the Nebraska History Museum in downtown Lincoln.
Trabold is being honored for her book Five Plots (Hobart & William Smith College Press, 2018) The publisher states that “Trabold explores themes of family, heritage, belonging, nostalgia, and the natural world in a series of beautiful, tightly-woven essays. Through her unique formal experimentations with prose, Trabold offers a fresh perspective of this often-overlooked terrain.”
Professor John Gregory Brown, who directs the creative writing program at Sweet Briar, described Trabold’s writing as elegantly embodying the very definition of the lyric essay: “Her essays are shapely and musical; they’re both immediate and complex,” he said. “They take the bombardment of experience, the sensory impressions of a Midwest childhood and a restless imagination and an artistic sensibility, and craft from those disparate forces these wonderful meditations. Erica’s essays do indeed shock and thrill and tether our attention. They make music of the world.”
Trabold is a graduate of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. She earned a master of fine arts degree from Oregon State University.