We are happy to announce that judge Janisse Ray has selected Kelly Beard’s memoir, AN IMPERFECT RAPTURE, as the 2017 winner of the Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award! Kelly will receive $1,000, and her book will be published in the fall of 2018.
Kelly Beard spent most of the 1980s working as a political organizer in Iowa and Montana, and serving as Assistant to the Secretary of the National Organization for Women, work that led her into law school. Kelly practiced employment discrimination in the Atlanta area for two decades, during which time she founded the Professional Women’s Information Network (ProWIN) and received multiple awards for her legal and community service. She was recognized as a “Super Lawyer,” a “Star of Atlanta,” and as one of the nation’s “Preeminent Female Lawyers,” and received a certificate of recognition from the Georgia Coalition Against Domestic Violence for her service with the Legal Assistance for Victims Project. In 2014, she returned to college to study the craft of writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where she received her MFA in Creative Writing in 2016. Her work appears in the Santa Ana River Review, Creative Nonfiction, Bacopa Literary Review, Five Points, and other journals. Portions of her memoir, in different forms, placed in the 2016 Tucson Literary Book Festival’s CNF Essay Contest and in the 2017 First Book Contest sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Writers Association. An Imperfect Rapture is her first full-length memoir.
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We would also like to congratulate runner-up Doug Crandell and this year’s finalists and semifinalists.
Runner-up: Tornado Season by Doug Crandell
Finalists:
Justin Gardiner, Beneath the Shadow: Legacy and Longing in the Anarctic
Peter Grandbois, Kissing the Lobster
Rachel Michelle Hanson, The End of Tennessee
Brenda Miller & Julie Marie Wade, Telephone: Essays in Two Voices
Anne Panning, Walking Backwards
A.A. Weiss, Lenin’s Asylum
Semifinalists:
Kim Adrian, The 27th Letter of the Alphabet
Kat Moore, In a Blue Fog
Lucy Sweeney Byrne, Selfie
Laurie Blauner, I Was One of My Memories
Julie Marie Wade, The Hourglass: Meditations on the Body
Sandra Worsham, Going to Wings
Jodie Noel Vinson, The Only House in the World
Janet Yoder, Where the Language Lives
Charles Green, Ways of Being Afraid
M.B. McLatchey, Beginner’s Mind
Jacqueline Haskins, Underwater, Eyes Open
Betty Jo Buro, The Road from Emmaus
Alison Amorello Seibold, Somebody’s Babies
Sincerest thanks to our readers, to final judge Janisse Ray, and to all who submitted manuscripts to this year’s contest.
