Atlanta, Ga. – For the fourth straight year, the University of Georgia’s Georgia Review has won a gold award for general excellence in the Magazine Association of the Southeast’s annual GAMMA Awards competition.
During the April 29 awards ceremony at the W Midtown Atlanta Hotel, the internationally known quarterly publication also earned three other gold awards and a total of 10 citations from the various judging panels drawn from a national pool of professional editors and journalists. The 2010 awards are for issues published during 2009.
“The Georgia Review thrives in a no-man’s land between books and magazines, a place the Internet has yet to find and that television could never envision. The foundation for its eclectic compilations of poetry and essays, fiction and art, is not what has happened yesterday or today, or even predictions for tomorrow, but timelessness,” according to the judges’ statement for the general excellence award.
In the best feature category, The Georgia Review swept the top three spots. The bronze award went to Whitney Groves for her first-ever publication, “O Taste and See,” which recounts a cross-country road trip that is both physical and spiritual-in Groves’s words, “the search for transcendence at seventy miles an hour.” Mary Cappello took the silver award for “Getting the News: A Signer among Signs,” a highly personal account of battling breast cancer combined with this intellectual feminist’s take on the related language games played by the medical profession and society in general.
Best feature gold went to “Music From,” a multipart section of writings by and about the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Albert Goldbarth. “Full of wonder, information, and wild metaphors,” said the judging panel, “this packaged feature honors the beauty, power, and mystery of words and soars with imagination and humanity.”
The Review also earned top ranking in the best profile category with Judith Kitchen’s “True Heart,” the author’s detailed examination of, and meditation on, a journal her mother kept as a young woman during a 1930 trans-Atlantic ship crossing and tour of Europe. The judges call the work “spellbinding” and note that “thanks to her daughter’s smooth biographical transitions and asides, the subject of the profile emerges less from what she included in the journal’s pages, more from what she left unsaid or crossed out.”
The best essay gold went to Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Culture, Biology, and Emergence,” part of the Review’s spring 2009 issue feature entitled “Culture and the Environment-A Conversation in Five Essays.”
Characterizing Deming’s study as “a wise, profound, anecdotal, far-reaching, and truly philosophical account of many seemingly disparate topics,” the judges also observe, “How comforting it is to know that there is a periodical out there that consistently publishes essays this thoughtful.”
Best essay bronze went to the distinguished literary and social critic Ihab Hassan for “The Way We Have Become: A Surfeit of Seeming,” and the best single issue bronze went to the summer 2009 Georgia Review, which included, among many others, the Hassan, Cappello, and Kitchen pieces already cited.
Finally, two honorable mentions came to the Review. In best series for the abovementioned “Culture and the Environment” essays and in best profile for “Why All This Music?”-Albert Goldbarth’s ingeniously conducted self-interview that was part of the gold award-winning feature “Music From.”
Stephen Corey, current editor of The Georgia Review and a member of its staff since 1983, accepted the awards on behalf of the journal, its writers, artists, and the University of Georgia.
