Draft, Hunsinger, Ives and Nethercott Win Vermont Book Awards
Margaret Draft, Emma Hunsinger, Lucy Ives and GennaRose Nethercott were selected from a field of 15 finalists to receive Vermont's highest literary prize.

By Mary Ann Lickteig
Published May 3, 2025 at 10:00 p.m. | Updated May 6, 2025 at 7:43 p.m.

Vermont authors Margaret Draft, Emma Hunsinger, Lucy Ives and GennaRose Nethercott have won 2024 Vermont Book Awards. The winners of Vermont’s highest literary prize were announced on Saturday at Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier.

Each wins $1,000 and a cowbell trophy created by Walden master jeweler and metal artist Nikki Ibey. The prize, administered by the Vermont Department of Libraries and Vermont Humanities, was given in four categories for work published in 2024.

Draft won the poetry prize for her debut collection, Nowhere Was a Lake; Hunsinger won the children’s literature award for her first published graphic novel, How It All Ends; Ives won the creative nonfiction award for her collection of essays An Image of My Name Enters America; and Nethercott won the fiction prize for her short story collection Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories.

The winners were selected from a field of 15 finalists.

Noting these “truly difficult days” as President Donald Trump seeks to disband the national agencies that support the arts, humanities, museums and libraries, Vermont Humanities executive director Christopher Kaufman Ilstrup opened the awards ceremony by reading the poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up,” by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón.

Keynote speaker Bill McKibben said he initially intended to talk about how much fun it is to be a writer in Vermont, but recent news has made him somewhat paranoid. “I even started compiling a list for you of all the great volumes to be read in prison and stories about all the good books that have been written there,” he said.

We “are in very serious trouble,” the author and climate activist continued, “and that means we need very serious and very funny and very rude and very skilled guides out of that trouble. In a working culture, writers play that role.”

Creative nonfiction winner Ives also expressed gratitude for Vermont in her acceptance speech. Moving to the state in 2018 was one of her best decisions, she told the audience. “It has produced dramatic changes in my writing, and it's given me a sense of hope and purpose.”

Ives is a novelist, poet and an assistant professor of literary arts at Brown University. Her five interrelated essays in An Image of My Name Enters America explore identity, national fantasy and history as Ives examines events and records from her own life to excavate larger aspects of the past that have been suppressed or ignored.

In its "Best Books of 2024" roundup, Vulture called the work “part criticism, part personal essay, part intellectual jubilation” and “the most inventive and exciting work of nonfiction this year.”