Lynn Emanuel

For six months—until last week—Pitt Professor of English Lynn Emanuel had been hiding something from her friends and colleagues.

She had taken on a prestigious, but confidential, assignment that required her to work punishing hours. (Its rigors eventually forced her to start wearing a neck brace.) Emanuel’s secret workload even led to her angering some people by turning down, with no explanation, their requests for such routine but time-consuming favors as writing promotional squibs for their books.

Sworn to secrecy by The National Book Foundation, Emanuel couldn’t tell anyone that she had been chosen as a judge on the poetry panel for the National Book Award competition.

But with the Oct. 13 announcement of the 2004 National Book Award finalists, Emanuel can at last describe publicly what it’s like to be a judge in the elite competition.

What she can’t reveal is how or why she was selected for the honor in the first place. Because she hasn’t a clue.

“I do not know how any of us was selected,” said Emanuel, an award-winning poet who was codirector of Pitt’s Writing Program from 1998 to 2003. “I got a phone call, and they asked me if I would serve. They did not tell me, when I agreed to do it, who the other judges were going to be. I did find out at one point that several people had recommended me to be a judge, but I do not know who they are.”

Emanuel, who took a sabbatical last year to write, received a letter from The National Book Foundation on April 7 thanking her for her commitment to serve and outlining judging procedures. Her fellow poetry judges were Michael Waters (panel chair), James Galvin, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Al Young.

The National Book Award competition includes panels of judges in four categories—fiction, nonfiction, young people’s literature, and poetry. Five finalists in each category are selected.

Publishers have until mid-August to submit books for National Book Award consideration. Eligible books for the 2004 prizes must have been published in the United States between Dec. 1, 2003, and Nov. 30, 2004, and must have been written by a U.S. citizen. This year’s submissions exceeded previous years’. Judges chose from 1,074 entries submitted by 226 publishers and imprints.

Last June, Emanuel and her fellow poetry judges individually began reading the 161 poetry books submitted for the 2004 National Book Award poetry prize, a record number.

“Everyone reads all the books. From the beginning of June until mid-August, each one of us compiled lists of books we each found especially compelling,” said Emanuel. “Throughout the process, we were involved in a series of phone conferences about the books, and then from August until the beginning of October we had the really hard conversations about who’s going to be a finalist.”

Emanuel said National Book Award judges discuss submissions by conference call, and deliberations are strictly confidential. So much so, that whenever Meg Kearney, associate director of The National Book Foundation, set up conference calls for Emanuel and her fellow judges, Kearney instructed the judges to say nothing about competing books or authors until she got off the line.

“There were five of us [judges], and we each had different lists of books we were enthusiastic about,” said Emanuel. “We talked long and hard about the books, and each of us started to reread and rethink. It is a huge process.”

They eventually agreed on the following finalists: William Heyen, Shoah Train (Etruscan Press); Donald Justice, Collected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf); Carl Phillips, The Rest of Love (Farrar, Straus & Giroux); Cole Swensen, Goest (Alice James Books); and Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003 (Wesleyan University Press).

Emanuel and her fellow poetry judges haven’t completed their duties yet. They must choose the winner from among the five finalists on Nov. 17, prior to that day’s National Book Awards benefit dinner and ceremony at the Marriott Marquis in New York City. Each winner receives $10,000 plus a bronze statue. Each finalist gets $1,000 and a bronze medal.

“We all meet in New York, we have the five finalist’s books in front of us, and nobody, including The National Book Foundation, will know who the winner is until the night of the dinner and ceremony, when the panel chair stands up and announces the winner,” Emanuel explained.

Emanuel said judging the National Book Award was in some ways quite similar to her previous experiences as a judge and panelist for the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts. What made her National Book Award experience uniquely challenging, Emanuel said, were the six-month duration of the judging process and the number of books she had to read.

“I would read books for eight hours a day,” she said. “I got a neck problem from reading so many book. I did start wearing a neck brace around.” Emanuel began referring to the contraption as “The National Book Award Neck Brace.”

Despite The National Book Foundation’s confidentiality rule, Emanuel decided that she had to tell David Bartholomae, chair of Pitt’s English department, that she had been chosen as a judge because she was ending a year’s leave and would be expected to do substantial departmental committee work—an obligation that would have been extremely challenging, given her judging workload.

“A lot of people got quite angry at me because they would ask me to do something—promotional copy for a book, for example—and I had to say, ‘I can’t do this right now,’” Emanuel recalled. “Some of these were important things that I had to turn down, and I couldn’t tell anybody why I was turning them down.”

Have her colleagues forgiven her?

“I hope they will,” Emmanuel replied, “after they find out that I was a judge!”