The editors are pleased to announce that Lee Peterson of Pennsylvania has won the 2021 Cider Press Review Book Award contest for her manuscript, In the Hall of North American Mammals (originally submitted under the title The Needles Road). Runner-up was Without Leaves by Triin Paja and Honorable Mention goes to Of Many Rooms by Nicole Callihan.
Judge Devon Miller-Duggan writes:
While moving through both the terrors of parenting and the even more frightening recognition that children have to be let go, this book still finds ways to acknowledge the delicacy and tension of childrearing with grace and whimsy. While managing that nerve-inducing balance, it also finds the ways in which, like nearly every 17th century Dutch still life painting, being a parent paints everything in life with an eye to inevitable mortality. Turning the Red Riding Hood narrative into a leitmotif that meditates on the fragility of both those who let go and those who are let go turns the book into an exquisite and ferocious intersection between language and discomfort.”
Peterson is the author of Rooms and Fields: Dramatic Monologues from the War in Bosnia (Kent State University Press) and a chapbook, The Needles Road (forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has also appeared in such journals as Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Chautauqua, Southern Humanities Review, and THRUSH. Peterson’s research, writing, and community interests center on issues of human rights, displacement and migration, motherhood, and the lived experiences of women and girls. She teaches writing and works with international students at Penn State University’s Altoona campus.
Peterson will receive a standard publishing contract, 25 author copies of the book, and a $1500 honorarium. In the Hall of North American Mammals is scheduled to be published in January, 2023.
