Wednesday, January 11, 2012

THE RIOTS wins prestigious first-book award

THE RIOTS has just won the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) New Writers Award for Creative Non-fiction. Now in its forth-third year, the GLCA New Writers Award recognizes newly published writers and introduce the best among them to students and faculty on GLCA campuses. Author Danielle Cadena Deulen will tour the GLCA's thirteen member colleges to read from her work and talk about writing. Here's what the GLCA judges have to say about THE RIOTS:
These (often very short) essays are highly compressed and highly realized, sharply drawn, intense in their urgently lyrical way, exquisitely written. Deulen's dialogues and descriptions, fractured and prismatic throughout, seem to burn rather than ease into memory, so charged is her language, and so deft her capacity for rendering stark, surreal scenes. This is a book written with a care for language—the imagery is often beautiful and surprising, the surprise like tiny explosions now and again within a sentence, a paragraph, on a page. The beauty not a pretty beauty, but sometimes ugly in a tough, edgy way. The organization of the book follows the associative logic of poetry—or of memory. The innovative, non-chronological sequence in which these pieces are placed creates a larger story that feels bigger than the sum of its parts and digs deep into the racial and gendered consciousness of the narrator and the times and places in which her story takes place.
The UGA Press has now won a GLCA New Writers Award in each of its three categories: creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. In addition to THE RIOTS, winning UGA Press books include HARDSCRABBLE by Kevin McFadden (poetry) and COMPRESSION SCARS by Kellie Wells (fiction).

THE RIOTS is also a winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award for Creative Nonfiction.