SOUTHERN BOOK SELLERS' BEST OF 2000: A St. Petersburg poet and a former St. Petersburg journalist are among the winners of the Southeast Booksellers Association (SEBA) Book Awards. Poet Peter Meinke won the poetry award for Zinc Fingers (University of Pittsburgh Press) and New York Times reporter Rick Bragg, who worked at the St. Petersburg Times before joining the New York Times, capped the nonfiction prize for Somebody Told Me (University of Alabama Press). The fiction award went to Tony Early for Jim The Boy (Little Brown); children's prize was awarded to Kate DiCamillo for Because of Winn-Dixie (Candlewick Press).

BOOK CRITICS' BEST OF 2000:Biographies of a Japanese emperor, a newspaper mogul, a French writer and a Moravian monk who pioneered the study of genetics are among the books nominated by the National Book Critics Circle for its Biography/Autobiography 2000 award. Also selected for that category is the second volume of Victor Klemperor's I Will Bear Witness 1941-1945: A Diary of the Nazi Years. Klemperor, a German Jew, died in 1960, but his diaries have only been recently come to light.

The nominated biographies are Herbert P. Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan; Robin Marantz Henig's The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel; David Nasaw'sThe Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst and Jean-Yves Tadi's Marcel Proust: A Life.

Nominations for the group's fiction award for 2000 include two collections of short stories (Amy Bloom's A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You and David Means' Assorted Fire Events: Stories) and three novels Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Jim Crace's Being Dead; and Zadie Smith's White Teeth.

Here are the NBCC nominations in three other categories:

General non-fiction Fred Anderson's Crucible of War; Ted Conover's Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing; Frances Fitzgerald's Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War; Laurie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health; and Alice Kaplan's The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach.

Poetry: Yusef Komunyakaa's Talking Dirty to the Gods; Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours; Michael Collier's The Ledge; Judy Jordan's Carolina Ghost Woods; and Davis McCombs' Ultima Thule.

Criticism: Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to Present; Cynthia Ozick's Quarrel & Quandary; Claudia Roth Pierpont's Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World; Charles Rosen's Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New; and Sherod Santos's A Poetry of Two Minds.

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