Missoula News

Western Book Roundup

Rocky Mountain Writers Score The Story Prize, NAACP Image Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Nomination

By Jenny Shank, 3-09-11

Carleen Brice: bringing an NAACP Image Award home to Denver.

Listen up: Western writers kicked butt last week.

First, Boise’s Anthony Doerr won The Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall. The Story Prize awards $20,000 annually to one writer of an outstanding collection of fiction in English published during the prior year.

Next, the finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction were announced, and the shortlist includes--straight out of Laramie--Brad Watson’s Aliens in the Prime of Their Lives.

Then, Denver novelist Carleen Brice traveled to Los Angeles Friday for the NAACP Image Awards, where Sins of the Mother, a Lifetime original movie based on Brice’s first novel Orange, Mint and Honey, was nominated for Outstanding Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special. Did she win? You bet your Rocky Mountain oysters she did. (Visit her fabulous blog, White Readers Meet Black Authors, why don’t you?)

Meanwhile, The Weird Sisters by Denver’s Eleanor Brown and West of Here by Washington state novelist Jonathan Evison are hanging out together on the New York Times Best-Seller List for Hardcover Fiction. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Montana’s Jaime Ford has been on the paperback fiction list for forty weeks now.

See? It’s all about training at altitude.

• Is it book festival season already? It must be, because the Tucson Festival of Books will take over the University of Arizona campus on March 12 and 13 (9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. each day, free admission). Authors who will give readings, sign books and participate in discussions include Ishmael Beah, C.J. Box, Philip Caputo, Craig Childs, Margaret Coel, Dave Cullen, Jamie Ford, Julia Glass, Jim Harrison, Craig Johnson, Louis Sachar, Luis Alberto Urrea, Jess Walter, Tom Zoellner, and dozens more. Tom Miller let me know that on Saturday at the festival, he’s going to interview Frank Deford (11:30 a.m.) and Martin Cruz Smith (2:30 p.m.).

This will mark just the third year for the Tuscon Festival of Books, but already it’s one of the liveliest and best-attended book festivals in the country, attracting an estimated 70,000-80,000 participants last year.  Speaking of festivals, I’m working on updating our Book Festivals of the West map for this year, so if you are a festival organizer, please send me your information.

• On March 14, the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado in Boulder will host its annual Words to Stir the Soul event at the Wolf Law Building (7 p.m., free). Every year, the Center invites various notable Western people to read selections from their favorite works of Western literature. This year’s theme is somber, as it marks the six-month anniversary of the fire that devastated Fourmile Canyon, and so the readings are intended to be “Words to Stir the Soul and Reckon with Reality.”

One of the speakers will be Andi O’Connor, whose blog about losing her home in the fire, Burning Down the House, was featured in the New York Times last week. Caroline Dworin interviewed O’Connor about what it’s like to lose her home twice—her family’s home burned to the ground when she was a child—and how she’s trying to recover and rebuild.

Other readers include Will Toor, Boulder County Commissioner, Joe Pelle, Boulder County Sheriff, Doug Looney, former Sports Illustrated writer and Fourmile resident, Don Whittemore, Assistant Chief, Rocky Mountain Fire, Rodrigo Moraga, firefighter and co-founder of Anchor Point Fire Management Consultants.

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