I Have Gone Seven Months Without Betting on Literary Prizes

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

It started innocently enough about twenty years ago. I was enjoying an espresso with my friend Charley on a rainy Portland afternoon in the Anne Hughes Reading Room at Powell’s Books. The conversation turned to the National Book Awards. Charley was rooting for poet Harryette Mullen’s, Sleeping with the Dictionary. I scoffed and told him that Ruth Stone’s, In the Next Galaxy was a…