W.D. Snodgrass and Lia Purpura are both finalists for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award. Snodgrass' Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems was nominated for the poetry prize, while Purpura's On Looking is a finalist for the prize for criticism. Both authors are alumni of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Purpura, this semester's Bedell Visting Writer to the Nonfiction Writing Program, is the author two collections of poems, Stone Sky Lifting, and The Brighter the Veil; a collection of essays, Increase; and the translator, from Polish, of Poems of Grzegorz Musial: Berliner Tagebuch and Taste of Ash. Snodgrass has published more than 20 books of poetry; he wrote his Pulitzer Prize-winning book of poems, Heart's Needle, while a student at the Workshop.

Together, over 700 book reviewers determine the winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award, which are offered in five categories: fiction, general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry, and criticism. The winners of the award will be announced in early March.