The AWP Award Series in Creative Nonfiction

Winner: Karen Salyer McElmurray
Mother of the Disappeared: An Appalachian Birth Mother's Journey, University of Georgia Press

Beverly Lowry, Judge

Karen Salyer McElmurray is originally from Johnson County in Eastern Kentucky. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Georgia College and State University. She is also the author of a novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, which received the 2001 Chaffin Award.

The AWP Award Series in the Novel

There was no Novel Prize for the 2003 Competition

The Donald Hall Prize for Poetry

Winner: Barbara Hamby
Babel, University of Pittsburgh Press

Stephen Dunn, Judge

Barbara Hamby has published two books of poems: Delirium (University of North Texas, 1995) which won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, and the Kate Tufts Award; and The Alphabet of Desire (NYU, 1999) which won the 1998 New York University Poetry Prize and was chosen as one of the 25 best books of 1999 by the New York City Public Library. Her poems have been published in many literary journals and she teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University at Tallahassee.

The AWP Award Series in Short Fiction

Winner: Doreen Baingana
Tropical Fish, University of Massachusetts Press

Joan Silber, Judge

Doreen Baingana is from Uganda and has lived in the US for 12 years. She has an MFA from the University of Maryland. Her work has appeared in journals such as Chelsea, Glimmer Train, the Sun, Crab Orchard Review, Meridian, and the Potomac Review, and her poetry is included in the anthology, Beyond the Frontier. She received an Artist’s Grant from the District of Columbia Commission on the Arts and Humanities in 2002. She works for Voice of America radio.