On Saturday, January 24, at the Housing Works Bookstore Café in Manhattan, Brenda Shaughnessy, a writer in residence in the Literary Studies Department at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts, and Vivian Gornick, Brenda Wineapple, and Honor Moore, faculty members in The New School Writing Program, were chosen as finalists for the National Book Critic's Circle Award.

Shaughnessy was chosen in the poetry category for her book, Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press), which taps into themes that have inspired era after era of poets: love, sex, and pain. Harvard Review called her work, “Sassy, tough-girl humor….”

Gornick was chosen in the criticism category for her book, The Men in My Life (Boston Review / MIT), where she focused on the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Bookforum said, "Gornick remains one of the more intelligent, independent-minded readers writing criticism today.”

Wineapple was chosen in the biography category for her book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Knopf). Here, she elegantly delves into the little-known relationship between two of the late–19th century's most intriguing writers. The New Yorker said “Wineapple is an astute literary biographer with a feisty prose style and a relish for unsettling received ideas.”

Moore was chosen in the autobiography category for her book, The Bishops Daughter (WW Norton), in which she offers a painfully honest memoir of her father, Paul Moore (1919–2003), the Episcopal bishop of the diocese of New York from 1972 to 1989. Newsday called her work, “A probing autobiography and forthright reflection on a man who, for all his flaws, inspired his daughter to understand him.”

On March 11, at 6:00 p.m. in Tishman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, this year’s finalists will read from their work. On March 12, also in Tishman Auditorium, the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Awards Ceremony will be held.

The National Book Critics Circle, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin, consists of some 700 active book reviewers who are interested in honoring quality writing and communicating with one another about common concerns. It is managed by a 24-member, all-volunteer board of directors.