Winners

2003 Winner

Second Annual Award
Salt (Picador)
By Isabel Zuber

A bright, imaginative child exulting in a rare freedom in the mountains of North Carolina at the turn of the twentieth century, Anna Maud Stockton Bayley grows into a young woman possessed of romantic yearnings and a great love of books. Hungering to make a new kind of life for herself, she marries John Bayley, a man twice divorced, and begins a family amid a difficult and fiery union.

"[A] beautifully conceived and gracefully executed first novel . . . The lyric cadences of Zuber’s prose and her tender evocation of the landscape and atmosphere of her native region have much to do with the emotional richness of her touching account of one woman's inner awakening" (Publishers Weekly).

Isabel Zuber was born and grew up in Boone, North Carolina. She graduated from Appalachian State University and received a master's degree from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has published three collections of poems: Oriflamb (NC Writers Network, 1987), Winter's Exile (Scot’s Plain Press, 1997), and Red Lily (Press 53, 2010). She now lives in Winston-Salem, where she was a librarian at Wake Forest University for many years.