The Girls in My Town: Essays by Angela Morales wins the 2017 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for Art of the Essay!
River Teeth is pleased to announce the winner of the 2014 Nonfiction Book Prize is Angela Morales of Pasadena, Calif. Her collection of essays entitled The Girls in My Town was selected by contest series final judge Cheryl Strayed. The book will be published by The University of New Mexico Press and made available in the spring of 2016.
“These essays are wonderfully universal, for all of their intimacy. I never wanted to stop reading,” Strayed commented.
Morales is an English teacher at Glendale Community College in California and a graduate of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Her essays have recently appeared in Best American Essays 2013, The Southern Review, The Los Angeles Review, and The Harvard Review. Her essay “Riding in the Dark” appeared in River Teeth in 2011.
More than 270 excellent manuscripts were submitted for this year’s contest. All were screened by River Teeth editors Joe Mackall and Dan Lehman. A group of finalists were selected and sent to Strayed for final selection. Other high finalists were Annya Broderick, Fleda Brown, Scott Gould, Susan Hauser, Kim Kupperman, Michael Palmer, Rachael Peckham, and Lori Tobias.
All who entered the contest will receive a complimentary one-year subscription to River Teeth journal. Watch for details soon about next year’s contest.
Buy The Girls in My Town: Essays
from University of New Mexico Press
The Girls in My Town is the work of a masterful writer who is adept at the art of implication. The elegantly structured essays in The Girls in My Town illuminate the politics of everyday life with quiet wit and real humanity. Angela Morales writes with nuance, humility, and bold feminism about life and death, love and anger, and striving to find a place to belong.” —PEN judges Eula Biss, Kiese Laymon, and Paul Steiger
“Beautifully written, sharply perceptive. . . . I love this writer’s voice, the way she writes humor and sorrow and disappointment with such humanity and intelligence. These essays are wonderfully universal, for all of their intimacy. I never wanted to stop reading.” —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
“The twelve essays in The Girls in My Town take an honest look at the rich experiences of girls trying to make space for their intelligence and imaginations. . . . An auspicious debut.” —Rigoberto González, NBC News Latino
“In this remarkable autobiographical essay collection, Angela Morales paints a stunning portrait of growing up and finding her voice in Los Angeles. . . . Morales is a home run-hitter of a writer, and she’ll have you holding on to your seat with every page.” —Bustle
“Compellingly rendered. . . . Essays that are as thematically ambitious as they are deeply personal.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Morales has a strong, lyrical voice, and her essays and anecdotes can be humorous and loving and darkly meditative as they address family, beauty and violence, loss and love. In short, this collection is as varied, charming, stark, and inspiring as life itself, in Los Angeles or anywhere.” —Shelf Awareness
“It’s Morales’s ability to explore the complexities that lie beneath the surface of the seemingly mundane, her patient and unflinching handling of her story, and her drive to expose larger truths that makes this such an elegantly crafted collection.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“[Morales’s] is the kind of writing that makes reading so rewarding.” —Story Circle Book Reviews
