Jane Hicks Wins the 2015 James Still Award for Poetry for DRIVING WITH THE DEAD: POEMS

By: Christina Mancuso Sep. 11, 2015

Lexington,KY-University Press of Kentucky author Jane Hicks has been named the recipient of Appalachian Writers Association's 2015 James Still Award for Poetry for her book Driving with the Dead: Poems. The AWA's mission is to promote and recognize writing about the Appalachian region. They work to celebrate writers who are living or have lived in the Appalachian region and those who have significant Appalachian connections through heritage or scholarship. The AWA currently gives out five awards each year: The Hariette Arnow Award for Short Story, The Wilma Dykeman Award for Essay, The James Still Award for Poetry, The Josefina Niggli Award for Playwriting and The Tom Jackson Award for Young Writers.

Set in Appalachia, the poems in Driving with the Dead claim both personal and cultural history, even as they speak out against the forces that threaten both. Invoking personal memories, she explores how the loss of physical landscape has also devastated the region's psychological landscape. Personal loss is evidenced in "Black Mountain Breakdown" and "A Poet's Work," both dedicated to three-year-old Jeremy Davidson, who was killed when a boulder from an illegal strip mine plunged over 600 feet from the top of the Black Mountain and crashed through the side of his family's home in Inman, Virginia. Hicks also celebrates the same personal and cultural history she sees under threat. "The Ryman Auditorium, 1965" describes the poet's reluctant conversion after being taken to a show of "droning banjos, chirpy mandolins, crying fiddles" when she would have preferred The Beetles. Throughout the collection, she offers readers poignant mediations on grief and death while also illustrating the beauty, grace, and resilience of the Appalachian people.

Jane Hicks has previously won the AWA Award for Poetry in 2006 for her first collection, Blood and Bone Remember: Poems from Appalachia. Driving with the Dead is the seventh University Press of Kentucky book to win an AWA award, joining From the Mountain, From the Valley: New and Collected Poems by James Still as winner of the poetry award. In addition, Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers by Joyce Dyer, Songs of Life and Grace: A Memoir by Linda Scott DeRosier, My Appalachia: A Memoir by Sidney Saylor Farr, Bloody Breathitt: Politics and Violence in the Appalachian South, by T.R.C. Hutton, and Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia by Helen Lewis all won the AWA's Book of the Year Award for Nonfiction.