April 2007—Black Glasses Like Clark Kent by Terese Svoboda has been chosen as the winner of the 2007 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.  Svoboda will receive a $12,000 advance, and Graywolf will publish Black Glasses Like Clark Kent in February 2008.
Robert Polito served as the outside judge for the contest. On choosing the winner, he said:

"Few books over the past decade have surprised and moved me as much as Terese Svoboda’s Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. A family romance in the guise of a biography and memoir, this is also a mystery in the spirit of writers as various as Dashiell Hammett and Sigmund Freud, Patricia Highsmith and D. W. Winnicott. Black Glasses is, as Svoboda intimates, a 'triptych,' a three-story house that spans World War II Japan and contemporary America, creating imaginative space for the intricate lives of her uncle and cousin as well as her own. Resourceful, elegantly phrased, angry, stubborn, fierce, beautiful, and ultimately devastating— I’m honored and pleased to award the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize to Terese Svoboda's Black Glasses Like Clark Kent."

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is designed to honor and encourage the art of literary nonfiction, and it is given to an outstanding manuscript by an emerging author has published no more than two previous books of nonfiction.

On learning that her manuscript had won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, Terese Svoboda commented, “War and what goes on in military prisons have been of deep national concern of late. I am delighted the book will appear when it will have the most resonance.”

Graywolf’s director and publisher Fiona McCrae said, “Terese Svoboda’s manuscript stood out for all of us.  In telling the story of how her uncle’s war experience came back to haunt him at the end of his life, she not only unveils the pain of one man, but of the consequences of a chapter in American history that is sadly relevant to our times.  She does so with great grace and compassion.”

Svoboda will be honored at an event at the New School in New York on publication of the book in February 2008.

The winner of the 2006 prize, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments by Ander Monson, was published on February 1.  In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Wonderfully recondite and cunningly executed, Monson’s work will make a brilliant discovery for open-minded fans of narrative nonfiction.”  The 2005 prize was awarded to Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles by Kate Braverman. Graywolf’s editors and Polito will consider submissions for the fourth annual prize later this year.

Terese Svoboda has published nine books of prose and poetry, most recently
Tin God. Svoboda’s writing has been featured in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Slate, Bomb, Columbia, Yale Review, and the Paris Review. She lives in New York.

Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, and critic. His books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography; Doubles; and A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. The recipient of Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim fellowships, Robert Polito is the Director of the Graduate Writing Program at the New School in New York.

Graywolf Press is an independent, not-for-profit publisher dedicated to the creation and promotion of thoughtful and imaginative contemporary literature essential to a vital and diverse culture. 

The Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize is funded in part by endowed gifts from the Arsham Ohanessian Charitable Remainder Unitrust and the Ruth Easton Fund of the Edelstein Family Foundation.