BTW News Briefs

Osondu Booksellers Makes Progress in Oprah Campaign

This past July, Margaret Osondu of Osondu Booksellers in Waynesville, North Carolina, launched a campaign to bring her store, and independent booksellers as a whole, to the attention of Oprah Winfrey. Her persistence has finally garnered a response: According to Shelf Awareness, an employee of Harpo Entertainment, Winfrey's production company, contacted Osondu and requested that she send a video of the store and town.

"We're so excited," Osondu told Shelf Awareness. She was working on creating and sending the video to meet an imminent deadline, and will have an answer in two weeks.

The campaign was launched when Osondu read that Amazon.com was offering discounted prices on "Sixty-Four Great Reads" in the July issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. Osondu told BTW that she knew she could sell the same titles at the same discount; however, she didn't have the budget to advertise in a national magazine. So she created a community-wide campaign to bring Winfrey to Waynesville.

To catch Winfrey's attention, Osondu sent her weekly packages. The first contained more than 300 postcards from customers, another contained more postcards and a highlighted copy of The Yellow Lighted Bookshop (Lewis Buzbee, Graywolf). Osondu also sent an 11" x 17" poster that says "Osondu Booksellers Invite You -- Oprah Winfrey -- to Our Independent Bookstore," which was signed by 61 local authors, most of whom participated in an author event co-sponsored by Osondu.

Whiting Writers' Awards Announced

On October 24, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation named the 10 recipients of the 2006 Whiting Writers' Awards, each of whom will receive $40,000. Past recipients include Jonathan Franzen, Sarah Ruhl, William T. Vollmann, Colson Whitehead, Jorie Graham, and Michael Cunningham.

The 10 writers recognized this year by the Whiting Foundation are:

• Sherwin Bitsui, poetry (Shapeshift, University of Arizona Press)
• Charles D'Ambrosio, fiction (The Dead Fish Museum, Knopf)
• Stephen Adly Guirgis, playwrighting (The Little Flower of East Orange, premieres at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2007)
• Tyehimba Jess, poetry (leadbelly, Verse Press)
• Suji Kwock Kim, poetry (Notes From the Divided Country, LSU Press)
• Yiyun Li, fiction (A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, Random House)
• Micheline Aharonian Marcom, fiction (The Daydreaming Boy, Riverhead)
• Nina Marie Martínez, fiction (Caramba! A Tale Told in Turns of the Card, Knopf)
• Bruce Norris, playwrighting (The Pain and the Itch, opened this fall in New York at the Playwrights Horizon)
• Patrick O'Keeffe, fiction (The Hill Road, Viking)