Authors Perry Glasser and John Samuel Tieman lead Short Story, Chapbook categories

Kansas City, MO - infoZine - BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) announces that two of its new titles – “Dangerous Places: Stories” by Perry Glasser of Haverhill, Mass. and “A Concise Biography of Original Sin” by John Samuel Tieman of St. Louis – have won Best Books 2009 Awards. The awards are sponsored by USABookNews.com, an online magazine and review Web site.

“Dangerous Places: Stories” won the Best Books 2009 Award for Short Story Fiction and the BkMk Press G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. Fear and dread transform Glasser’s characters, who include an abused single mother, a female college student in New York and a retired leadership trainer. All the characters run but cannot escape the images of danger that threaten them.

“Perry Glasser’s superb storytelling conjoins grace and peril, making ‘Dangerous Places’ irresistible to any reader who craves an authentic American voice and a sensibility that understands danger as a life-consuming force,” wrote Bob Shacochis, National Book Award winner.

Glasser is also the author of “Singing on the Titanic” and “Suspicious Origins,” which won the Minnesota Voices Award from New Rivers Press. A former public high school teacher in New York, he teaches at Salem State College in Massachusetts.

“A Concise Biography of Original Sin” received the Best Books 2009 Award for Poetry Chapbook. These poems explore war and its aftereffects, some inspired by Tieman’s experiences serving in the U. S. Army in Vietnam and then resuming civilian life. Others explore war from a historical vantage, such as Tieman’s powerful World War I elegy “Passchendaele,” which has been recorded by the Imperial War Museum in London. Tieman’s poems have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, Cimarron Review, Hawaii Review and The American Psychoanalyst.

“John Tieman’s vision is compassionate, realistic, ironic, and spiritual,” said Michael Simms, a contributing editor of the Pittsburgh Quarterly. “His is the poetry of authentic experience, every line having been earned in the mud of Vietnam and the streets of America.”

Born in St. Louis, Tieman has lived in Mexico City and the West Indies. He holds a Ph.D. from Saint Louis University. He teaches history and English in the St. Louis Public Schools. In addition to poetry, John Samuel Tieman has published essays in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Des Moines Register, Kansas City Star, National Catholic Reporter, Stars and Stripes and elsewhere.