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NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
Winter 2025
A TRIFECTA OF HONORS FOR DAVID JOY’S LATEST NOVEL by Margaret D. Bauer were nominated for the 2024 Raleigh Award, and the other books shortlisted by the judges for the honor were The Act of Contrition and Other Stories by Joseph Bathanti, Bright and Tender Dark by Joanna Pearson, Old Crimes by Jill McCorkle, The Caretaker by Ron Rash, and Inside the Wolf by Amy Rowland. The finalists for the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award were also heavy-hitting contenders for the honor: Erica Abrams Locklear’s Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People, Jennifer McGaha’s Bushwhacking: How to Get Lost in the Woods and Write Your Way Out, and Terry Roberts’s The Sky Club. The Wolfe award, which comes with a $1000 honorarium, was originated by the Louis Lipinsky family and has been presented by the Western North Carolina Historical Association (now the Asheville Museum of History) since 1955. Award panel Chair Catherine Frank said that Those We Thought We Knew “represented the traditions of our region but addressed a subject that we too often ignore,” and of Joy she wrote, “David Joy, in his nonfiction essays and his novels, has always presented a view of Appalachia that challenges our assumptions about mountain people. He writes of the beauty of the mountain landscapes, traditions and communities that are in danger of disappearing or changing beyond recognition.”1 The Willie Morris Awards, supported by an endowment from Dave and Reba White Williams of Connecticut, honor the former editor-in-chief of Harper’s Magazine and professor and writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi. Final judge for the fiction category in 2023, Monica Weatherly (who received the 2022 Willie Morris Award in Poetry) wrote of her selection of Joy’s novel, “His intricately developed characters, careful establishment of place and thoughtful storyline demonstrate a depth and complexity that challenges the reader to confront preconceived notions about race, friendship and community.” Joy responded to this honor, “This sort of recognition is blessed reassurance that the work I was trying to do is important and needed and valued. I’m thankful for the readers having sat with this story and I’m honored by the recognition.”2 Read Leah Hampton’s interview with David Joy in NCLR 2024 and a review of this award-winning novel in NCLR Online Fall 2024.
In December, David Joy added the Sir Walter Raleigh Award statue to the collection of honors bestowed upon his novel Those We Thought We Knew (Random House, 2023). Previously, the novel received the 2023 Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award and the 2023 Willie Morris Award for Fiction. The novel was also listed among Vanity Fair’s 20 Favorites for 2023 and selected by North Carolina Humanities to represent North Carolina at the 2024 Library of Congress National Book Festival and on the Library of Congress’s Great Reads from Great Places reading list PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID JOY
The Sir Walter Raleigh Award is given annually by the Historical Book Club of North Carolina and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association to “the most significant work of original fiction writing published over the course of the last year by a North Carolina author.” The North Carolina Book Awards are now managed by NCLR, and the editor reports that Joy’s novel was the unanimous first choice of all of the judges in the fiction category. Seventeen books
1
Will Hoffman, “David Joy Wins 2023 Thomas Wolfe Award for Novel named ‘favorite’ by Vanity Fair,” Asheville Citizen Times 17 Apr. 2024: web.
2
Willie Morris Award Winners to Read, Sigh Books, at Conference, Ole Miss News 23 Feb. 2024: web.