Faculty, students, and other members of the VCU community came together to honor Lorraine Adams and her book “Harbor” for the Fourth Annual First Novelist Award at the Singleton Center on Friday.
The First Novelist Award was started to honor rising talent in the literary world. Created in conjunction with VCU writer and alumnus David Baldacci, the award has since been given out to a variety of authors for their first novels, as chosen by a panel of judges.
The well-attended event featured many familiar faces littered the crowd, including moderator Patty Smith and faculty such as First Novelist Award founders Laura Browder and Tom DeHaven, as well as Marcel Cornis-Pope, Jennifer Koster, Gregory Donovan and Colleen Curran.
Clint McCown came up to announce the award to Adams after a few more acknowledgements and took several moments to introduce the work. He described the book as “rich in emotion, psychological death.suffering, resilience, hardship and hope.” As Adams came up to the stage, VCU e2 Bookstore Director Steve Gonzales presented her with a sculpture made and designed by Allan Rosenbaum, husband of Laura Browder.
The sculpture depicted a face cradled in a giant hand. After the ceremony, Browder described that the piece had been very important for her husband to make. It was his first ceramic casting, and it was the first time he had been able to come back to working with the material after a lengthy sabbatical due to an illness caused by pollution within a school studio he had worked in previously. With a laugh, Browder mentioned that the sculptured had just been finished the day of the event.
Adams was also given a $1000 cash prize and an all-expense-paid trip to the event from where she teaches at the New School in New York.
Adams, a magna cum laude graduate of Princeton and the holder of a master’s degree in literature from Columbia, took to the stage with a relaxed air. “Some of that was hard to listen to,” she said, regarding McCown’s introduction. “Well, no it wasn’t. It was divine to listen to!”
Adams went on to describe the background of her novel, which was based on her own journalism experience. Questioning the nature of terrorism and violence, the novel follows Aziz Arkoun, a 24-year-old Algerian stowaway who braves the icy waters of Boston harbor to swim to freedom.
As Adams began reading the first chapter, it became clear to the audience of how heavy the work would be. She opened it as a good segue into a novel of “funny names and strange places.” The first words of the book stay cemented into the minds of those who read or hear it: “Water never warms in American harbors.”
After the reading, the panel was directed by Patty Smith. Guests included literary agent Elizabeth Kaplan and freelance writer and author Caroline Kettlewell, who wrote such books as “Skin Game: A Memoir.”
Along with Adams, the three brought in each of their experiences writing books, their own processes creating their stories and advice for those present who were thinking of following the same path. “You can’t just decide to write a novel. You have to be a novelist,” Kaplan said. “If you’ve got good talent, it’s easy to write 100 pages, but it’s the next 200, that’s impossible.”