Waterston Desert Writing Prize
Charles Hood – 2017, 2021 and 2023 Finalist
Finalist Charles Hood proposed a project titled “Red Center,” focused on the Lambert Centre, one of the most remote locations in Australia. His base premise was that the middle of nowhere is the always the center of somewhere, and he wants to write a love letter to nothingness, based on a ten-mile radius of the Lambert marker.
Hood has spent his career working and living in the Mojave Desert. A selection of his desert-centered work earned him the 2016 Felix Pollak Prize in poetry, and in March 2017 Wisconsin University Press released the contest-winning manuscript, Partially Excited States. He also wrote Mouth, 2016 winner of the Kenneth Patchen Innovative Novel Prize. Hood’s book South x South was the 2013 Hollis Summers Prize winner, a book that recounts his experiences in Antarctica as an artist-in-residence with the National Science Foundation.