Atlanta, Ga. – The Georgia Review, the University of Georgia’s internationally known quarterly journal of arts and letters, recently came away from the twenty-second annual GAMMA Awards ceremony with two golds, three silvers, a bronze, an honorable mention-and a piece of history. The GAMMAs, given by the Magazine Association of the Southeast, are judged by professionals from across the United States.
The gold award for Best Feature went to “Cadaver, Speak” by Marianne Boruch, from the Review’s Summer 2010 issue. This thirty-page work examines life and death-literally-from the perspective of a ninety-nine-year-old female medical lab cadaver, the principal narrator of Boruch’s long poem. The Georgia Review’s editor, Stephen Corey, has not discovered evidence of a poem ever before winning a GAMMA Award for Best Feature or in any other category.
The judge said, “Marianne Boruch’s poetic expression quietly soars with a caustic and creepy, yet essential, unveiling of the human condition through-of all things-an autopsy. Thoroughly original, ‘Cadaver, Speak’ ventures beyond the naked and raw to peel back the ambitions and dreams not only of the ninety-nine-year-old protagonist but also of the medical students, whom we can ‘hear’ working and whose unease and triumphs we feel. How wondrous a dichotomy to disclose life through rot.”
The Review’s other gold, for Best Single Issue, went to the Fall 2010 issue, with its multipart feature on the work of the late Georgia writer Raymond Andrews, art by Benny Andrews, an essay by National Book Award-winner Barry Lopez, and much more.
The judge commented, “This collection of essays, fiction, poetry, reviews, and art provides evidence aplenty why The Georgia Review has earned its place among the very best English-language literary journals. What sets this issue apart is its tribute to the Georgia-born writer Raymond Andrews (1934-91)-‘the most extended focus on an individual writer’ in the magazine’s sixty-four years. It includes correspondence between Andrews and the writer Gary Gildner (former college roommates who reconnected after thirty years), recollections by fellow writers, and unpublished stories by Andrews. The prose is engaging and illuminating-and that’s just half the book.”
The silver awards were for General Excellence (the Review having taken the Gold in this category for the past three years); for Best Photography, with Connie Imboden’s “Danse Macabre” in Summer 2010; and for Best Feature, honoring the entire Raymond Andrews spread, “Dreams, Ifs, and Alls,” in Fall 2010.
The bronze honor was in the Best Profile category and went to Gary Gildner’s essay “Remembering Raymond Andrews” -one part of “Dreams, Ifs, and Alls.” The Spring 2010 issue earned honorable mention for Best Single Cover with its minimal paper cutout by Kara Walker, “Bureau of Refugees: Mr. Alexander, colored preacher brutally beaten and forced to leave.”
The Georgia Review, founded at the University of Georgia in 1947 and published there continuously ever since, has won dozens of GAMMAs in numerous categories over the past two decades, including the Grand GAMMA for best overall magazine of any kind.
For more information on The Georgia Review, see http://www.uga.edu/garev/.