Several authors who took part in the Southwest Festival of the Written Word, October 2015, have gone on to win significant awards and recognition for their work.
Denise Chávez won a 2015 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for her novel The King and Queen of Comezón. She has also been named as a 2016 recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from UNM. This award comes under the umbrella of the Paul Ré Peace Prize. The winners are honored for Outstanding Peace Promotion Activities.
V.B. Price also wins the Lifetime Achievement Award from UNM for his work as a distinguished poet, human rights and environmental columnist, editor, journalist, architectural critic, novelist and teacher.
Kirstin Valdez Quade’s short story collection Night at the Fiestas won the John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a New York Times Notable Book.
Nasario Garcia’s Hoe, Heaven, and Hell: My Boyhood in Rural New Mexico won the Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Award, for outstanding publication regarding domestic life in New Mexico. In addition, his Grandma Lale’s Tamales: A Christmas Story won the Children’s Picture and Activity Books Award (Bilingual category).
Sharman Apt Russell won the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing for Diary of a Citizen Scientist.
Bonnie Buckley Maldonado won the WILLA Literary Award in Poetry for The Secret Lives of Us Kids: A Childhood Memoir, 1941-1942.
JJ Amaworo Wilson’s novel Damnificados was selected for a Top Ten Picks for 2016 list by ‘O’ the Oprah Winfrey Magazine.
