11 April 2007
Gaspereau Press Shortlisted for
Two Atlantic Book Awards

The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia released the shortlists for the 2007 Atlantic Book Awards today. Gaspereau Press is pleased to announce that two of its titles have been nominated. Peter Sanger’s Aiken Drum has been shortlisted for the Atlantic Poetry Prize and Elaine McCluskey’s The Watermelon Social has been shortlisted for the Margaret & John Savage First Book Award. Fellow nominees for poetry are Steve McOrmond for Primer on the Hereafter (Wolsak & Wynn) and Mary Dalton for Red Ledger (Véhicule Press); fellow nominees for first book are John G. Langley for Steam Lion (Nimbus) and M. Brook Taylor for A Camera on the Banks (Goose Lane Editions). Awards in these and eight other categories are given each year to recognize literary excellence in the Atlantic region.

The winners of the Atlantic Book Awards will be announced in a ceremony to be held at 4:00 pm on 11 May 2007 at Pier 21 (1055 Marginal Road, Halifax). The ceremony is one of the highlights of this year’s Atlantic Book Festival, to take place May 5–12. For more information about the awards and other festival events, please visit www.writers.ns.ca

BACKGROUND
Gaspereau Press is a literary publisher and printer based in Kentville, Nova Scotia. The press is committed to literature and the book arts, incorporating a range of modern and antique forms of printing and binding to create books that are distinctive in manufacture and design. Its publications have won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Alberta Book Award for fiction, the A.M Klein Prize for poetry and the Alcuin Award for excellence in book design.

Aiken Drum: In his sixth collection of poetry, Peter Sanger brings his archaeologist’s eye, along with classical and local iconography, to his encounters with domestic implements, local ecology, cultural relics and landmarks. The poems in this collection achieve a delicate balance between the grounded and the ethereal, such that the poet’s studies set down in words without losing any of the transient nature of seeing and of understanding. The poems in this collection share a stunning precision, and demonstrate a simultaneous thrift and exuberance of language and rhythm. Music comes from surprising places, adding a quality of purity and resolve in some places, achieving the liturgical lilt of nursery rhyme in others.

The Watermelon Social: Elaine McCluskey’s debut collection contains ten comical and aggressively human slices of suburban life. From grocery aisles to strip-mall parking lots to school hallways and waiting rooms, these stories pulse with the bizarre and sometimes annoying trappings of in-between places and the people we encounter there. McCluskey is an avid observer of subcultures and demonstrates a feel for the style and micro-dialects they foster. From the "psychotically precious" Sailor Moon girls at a city high school and the last of the hosers, to a weight loss convention and the night crew at a small-town paper, The Watermelon Social offers up highly specific cross-sections of North American lifestyles.

FESTIVAL READING DATES

Halifax, NS
Monday, May 7, 2007
Elaine McCluskey
7:00 pm – Keshen Goodman Library
330 Lacewood Drive

St. Johns, NL
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Elaine McCluskey (with Mary Dalton, Ami McKay and Stephen Kimber)
7:00 pm – Masonic Temple
6 Cathedral Street

Saint John, NB
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Peter Sanger (with Mary Dalton and Steve McOrmond)
7:00 pm – Faculty Staff Club
UNBSJ campus

Lower Sackville, NS
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Elaine McCluskey
7:00 pm – Sackville Public Library
636 Sackville Drive

Halifax, NS
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Peter Sanger (with Mary Dalton, Ami McKay & Linden MacIntyre)
7:00 pm – Alumni Hall
University of King’s College

For more information contact
Beth Crosby at Gaspereau Press
47 Church Avenue, Kentville, NS, B4N 2M7
902-678-6002, info@gaspereau.com