Gordon-Reed, Matthiessen win national book prizes

Annette Gordon-Reed of New York last night won the 2008 National Book Award for nonfiction, for a history of a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson. The author of "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family" is the first African-American woman to win the award for nonfiction.

The fiction winner was Peter Matthiessen, for his novel "Shadow Country," a saga of the violent career of E.J. Watson, a Faulkneresque figure in turn-of-the-20th-century Florida.

In poetry, the winner was Mark Doty for "Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems." A professor at the University of Houston, Doty has published seven previous collections, and lives in New York. The award for young people's literature went to Judy Blundell for "What I Saw and How I Lied," a dark novel about a young girl's relationship with a soldier returning from World War II. Blundell lives in Katonah, N.Y.

Gordon-Reed, professor of law at New York University and of history at Rutgers, tells the full Hemings story, from the family's origins in 17th-century Virginia until its members were sold after Jefferson's death. She is the author of a previous book about the slave woman with whom Jefferson is believed to have fathered a child, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy."

The annual award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was given to novelist Maxine Hong Kingston. The award is presented by the National Book Foundation, funded mainly by publishers, and includes a $10,000 cash prize.

Four Massachusetts authors - three of them Cambridge residents - were among the five finalists for each category: Frank Bidart of Cambridge, professor of English at Wellesley College, for his collection of poems, "Watching the Spring Festival"; in fiction, Salvatore Scibona of Provincetown, for his novel, "The End"; in nonfiction, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust for "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" and Joan Wickersham, for "Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order."