Battlelander Ron Capps has won Press 53′s first prize in creative non-fiction for his piece entitled The French Lieutenant’s iPod. (Press 53 is a small, well-regarded publisher of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in Winston-Salem, N.C.) We know Ron’s good — he writes for Battleland mostly about veterans, of which he is one — but this approaches the sublime. Judge and author Bill Roorbach said Ron’s piece, set in Chad near the Darfur border, contains “flickers of caring, flickers, even, of love, but in the end there’s nothing but despair. The writing is crisp, authoritative, rueful, very much alive in the face of death, and political in the best sense: an eyewitness account.” Read it and think.
