Panels enlighten while fiery ceremony speech blasts competition to independents.

After canceling its Western State Book Awards indefinitely in 1997, The Western States Arts Federation has triumphantly reorganized and redefined its awards. Last week ,with its co-sponsor, City Lights, WESTAF held a celebration to fete its 1999 winners. WESTAF, a 25-year-old organization serving the 12 western states through arts research and program development, is the only regional arts organization in the nation that has a book awards program.

Mei-mei Berssenbrugge won the p try award for her collection Four Year Old Girl from Kelsey Street Press in Berkeley. Kathleen Alcalá won in fiction for The Flower in the Skull (Chronicle Books), and Merrill Gilfillan garnered the nonfiction prize for Chokecherry Places from Johnson Books in Boulder.

The Western States Arts Federation awards are limited to submissions by publishers that have their principal offices in the participating western states. The winners, who each received $1000, were recognized at a lively and sometimes contentious reception and all-day literary forum at San Francisco's Eureka Theater May 18.

On hand to celebrate were San Francisco p t laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Cliff Becker, director of literature at the NEA; Anthony Radich, executive director of WESTAF; fiction judge and 1995 National Book Award winner Denise Chávez; and p try judge Brenda Hillman, a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Initiated in 1979 and funded by an NEA research grant, the first WESTAF awards were given in 1984 and have since recognized 33 authors and 24 presses. The research conducted in the early '80s under former director David Fraher found that bookselling is the pivotal link between writers and readers. "The same is true today," Fox told the audience at the ceremony.

For more than a decade, the awards ceremony was held at the ABA and "followed by lavish parties suited to attract attention from New York," said Joyce Jenkins, editor of the Bay Area's P try Flash and a participant in the awards' reorganization. David Fox, who was hired last year by WESTAF to reinvent the awards, said those events were instrumental in bringing greater attention to then unknown authors such as Rebecca Wells, whose Little Alters Everywhere (Broken Moon Press), was a 1992 recipient. Currently, however, WESTAF cannot afford to hold the awards at BEA.

The awards, given biannually until 1992, and then annually, originally carried a stipend of $5000 each for the author and the publisher, and WESTAF supported all phases of the book's publication, from printing to marketing. When WESTAF discontinued the awards in 1997, it was bombarded with calls from authors, nonprofit literary centers and small presses.

"The outcry solidified our commitment to bringing back the awards," said board chair Larry Williams. "It helped us to realize how important they were to our identity. But we also knew we could no longer afford the costs of the past."

In 1998, WESTAF allocated $25,000 to kickstart an effort to bring back the awards. "From the Cook Inlet Book Company in Anchorage to City Lights in San Francisco, booksellers told me the most important ingredient of the award is the recognition and promotion that it brings," said Fox.

Even before the NEA cut its budgets, the board knew it had to redefine its mission statement. After it saw 40% of its 1996 funding slashed, WESTAF even "considered dissolving the organization all together," said Williams. Instead, WESTAF moved its headquarters to Denver in 1997, cut its board from 30 to 15, and determined that the organization's primary beneficiary would be the state's art agencies. (Each state pays WESTAF roughly $20,000 a year as part of the organization's operating fee, and in return is represented on WESTAF's board.)

Panels and Forums

According to Fox, WESTAF decided to not only reorganize but to redefine the awards by including an ongoing forum to better promote, study and understand the literature of the region.

The panels included Heather Peeler from SPD Distribution, Steve Topping from Johnson Books, judge Denise Chávez, as well as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kathleen Alcalá Fox and PW's Roxane Farmanfarmaian.

Among the panels, "The Landscape of the Writer" examined how the environment and the landscape of the western states affect writers. During "The Landscape of the Reader," panelists shared ideas and fielded questions from the audience about the changing literary landscape in the West. Despite conflicting points of view on what it means to be a "western" writer, panelists defined the expansive landscape and vastly diverging ethnicities of the population as the influences that distinguish the regions' literature.

P t Lawrence Ferlinghetti rallied the battle cry and controversy by noting, "In spite of the chains and Amazon, we are rich in independents -- independent presses, authors and booksellers." He admonished audience to not do readings for or buy books from the chains. "You're stabbing the independents in the back every time you do," he said.

WESTAF's Williams followed Ferlinghetti's warning, declaring: "We're proud to be back in the business as the only regional supporting our writers. We're struggling with whether the independents and the independent nature of the West will survive. WESTAF is determined."