2010 Award Authors
Christie Hodgen
Christie won the Fiction Literary Prize and $2000 for her novel, Elegies for the Brokenhearted (Norton). Her book is five elegies introducing people whose lives shaped the main character Mary Murphy including a seedy uncle, an overweight college roommate, and a failed gay composer. Hodgen, an Alabama native, recalls such individuals she knew in her
youth. She said that she rarely gets feedback from her readers which made this prize so memorable.
Heather Sellers
Heather Sellers won the Nonfiction Literary Prize and $2000 for her memoir, You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know (Riverhead Press). Ms Sellers has face blindness, a disorder in which she can't remember what anyone looks like, even her own mother. She can only recognize people by their walk, their clothes, etc. According to Heather, she has "worked on this book all my life. I wanted to write about my crazy, chaotic family" including a drunken father and a schizophrenic mother.
Rebecca Barnhouse
Rebecca Barnhouse received $1200 for The Coming of the Dragon (Random House).
Kat Falls
Kat Falls grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland and attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then received an MFA in screenwriting at Northwestern University. She now teaches at NU, and received $800 from FAW for her book, Dark Life (Scholastic Press). This is a story for the young adult and is a deep sea adventure. She wanted to write a book "that was so fast that a reader would ignore the pings of the IM texting." She tried to find the creepiest cool animals under the sea. Every animal in the book has been researched and is real. The movie rights have been sold to Disney and the sequel is coming out in August.
Marianne Malone
Marianne Malone received $1200 for her juvenile novel, The Sixty-Eight Rooms (Scholastic Press), a fantasy about two children who are able to shrink themselves to explore the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute. Having gone to the museum many times all through her childhood, Ms Malone loved the rooms and this story came to her fully formed. She enjoys writing fiction where "you can write anything you want, like an artist. You can be creative without being necessarily accurate."
2010 Award Authors
Nick Reding
Nick Reding was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, and received his B.A. in Creative Writing and English Literature
from Northwestern University in 1994. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from N.Y.U., where he was a University
Fellow from 1995 til 1997. He lived in New York City for thirteen years, where he worked as a magazine editor,
a graduate school professor, and a freelance writer. His first book,
The Last Cowboys at the End of the World,
was published by Crown in 2002. Methland is his second book.
He has written for Harper’s, Food and Wine, Outside, Fast Company, and Details.
He lives with his wife and son in Saint Louis.
Bich Minh Nguyen
Bich Minh Nguyen was born in Saigon in 1974. On April 29, 1975, the night before the city fell,
her family fled Viet Nam by ship. Her family finally settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and currently teaches nonfiction,
fiction and Asian American Literature at Purdue University. She lives in Chicago and West Lafayette,
Indiana with her husband, writer Porter Shreve. Her memoir-in-essays,
Stealing Buddha's Dinner,
was published by Viking Penguin in 2007. Short Girls
was published by Viking Penguin in 2009 and
was named a best book by LIBRARY JOURNAL.
J. Adams Oaks
J. Adams Oaks is the author of Why I Fight (A Richard Jackson Book, Simon and Schuster),
which won both the National Society of Arts and Letters regional competition and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award.
He is a graduate of Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota and has a MFA in Fiction Writing from Columbia College Chicago.
Having lived all over (including New Orleans, Madison, Madrid, D.C., and Denver), Oaks finally settled in Chicago,
where he is currently a curator and editor for the Serendipity Theatre Collective's storytelling series, 2nd Story,
and hard at work on his second novel.
Barbara Olenyik Morrow
A St. Louis native, Barbara Olenyik Morrow is a transplanted Hoosier.
She attended Indiana University in Bloomington, where she received her bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in journalism. She worked for newspapers for many years, and in 1986
she and two coworkers at The Fort Wayne(IN) Journal Gazette were finalists for the Pulitzer
Prize in editorial writing. She is the author of two children’s picture books –
the spirited read-aloud Mr. Mosquito Put on His Tuxedo
(Holiday House, 2009, illustrated by Ponder Goembel) and A Good Night for Freedom
(Holiday House, 2004, illustrated by Leonard Jenkins). She lives in Auburn, Indiana with her
husband Douglas. They have four sons.
Joan Donaldson
Joan Donaldson earned her Master in Fine Arts from Spalding University,
Louisville, KY, with a major in creative nonfiction and a minor in writing for children. Joan not
only writes for children, but has published essays in
The Christian Science Monitor, Ideals Magazine and Rosebud Magazine,
and won the Ann Ricco Second Place Award for essay St. George and the Dragon.
Learn more about Joan Donaldson and her organic blueberry farm.
Reading Resources
A Few Books for Valentines Day
Love and Summer: A Novel by William Trevor
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
Sonnets From The Portugese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
The School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister
Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell