Salt Lake City News

Western Book Roundup

Westerners Among Whiting Winners

By Jenny Shank, 11-05-08

Benjamin Percy, photo by Katherine Berger.

Last week the 2008 Whiting Writers Award for emerging writers was announced, and among the ten winners of $50,000 each were a couple of Western writers, Oregon native fiction writer Benjamin Percy (whom we featured here), and fiction writer Manuel Muñoz, who currently lives in Tucson and teaches at the University of Arizona.  (There were also two California-based honorees, fiction writer Lysley Tenorio and poet Douglas Kearney.)

Oregon’s Barry Lopez presented the awards, and Galleycat shared this video interview with him, shot at the event.  Lopez said of the honorees, “The world’s problems are not theirs to solve—they’re the ones who will provide us the structure in which to think about how to address these things.” Critical Mass offered a transcript of Lopez’s remarks at the award ceremony.

The annual Words to Stir The Soul event sponsored by the Center for the American West will feature the topic of immigration this year at Old Main on CU campus in Boulder on November 12 (7 p.m.).  Each year, prominent local people gather to read their favorite short selections from the literature of the American West.  This year, the Center’s website notes, the event “will celebrate the literature of immigration, rather than the policies of immigration.” Scheduled speakers include former Mayor of Lakewood, Steve Burkholder, Bruce Finley of the Denver Post, Tina Griego of the Rocky Mountain News, writer Manuel Ramos, and writer Helen Thorpe, the wife of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper.

The Wasatch Journal has extended the deadline for its second annual “Quick-Draw Story Contest,” seeking short stories of 3,000 words or less that “play upon traditional Western themes or that reimagine the Western in new ways.” Writers, you’ve got until tomorrow, November 6 to submit your entry via email, so giddy up.

I will be on maternity leave from November 15 through January 12.  In the meantime, frequent Books & Writers contributor David Frey will be taking over, so if you have any upcoming regional book-related news or events to share, .

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