Gordon-Reed, Matthiessen win book prizes

National Book Award winners (from left): Mark Doty, Annette Gordon-Reed, Judy Blundell, and Peter Matthiessen at the ceremony in New York City. (Robin Platzer/associated press)

Reprinted from late editions of yesterday's Globe.

Annette Gordon-Reed of New York Wednesday 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.

The annual award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters was given to novelist Maxine Hong Kingston.

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 "The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order."