I won!

I am elated to announce that I won the 2009 James Duval Phelan award!  This is a prize offered to a writer born in California, and it’s given by the Intersection for the Arts, and sponsored by the San Francisco Foundation.  I will be reading in San Francisco on Monday, November 16th, along with Youmna Chlala and Page McBee, winners of the Joseph Henry Jackson Award and the Mary Tanenbaum Award, respectively.

Check out the announcement here.  And look at this(!):

The official award citation for Edan Lepucki’s 2009 James Duval Phelan Award winning fiction manuscript “Days of Insignificance and Evil” states: “But wait. I want to tell you another story, one that happened a few years before this. It must be related.” So says Rosalyn, the fourteen year old narrator in Edan Lepucki’s Days of Insignificance and Evil. In this remarkable and revelatory new novel we find Rosalyn carried along by events beyond her control—parents who abandon her to an older sister’s care, a new home life full of fracture, secret liaisons, and mysterious clues to a violent historical event; the all-female 1904 Los Angeles Iron Foundry Rebellion. As readers we’re carried along by a narrative voice in total control. Lepucki gives us a character that comes across as true and familiar as someone we know very well. Someone willing to share their secrets with us. Like the narrator we are quickly on the hunt to find out more about that past event.  Members of the rebellion surprise us by interrupting Rosalyn’s narrative and bringing their flesh and blood voices to the mix. Via that weave of past and present Lepucki makes disparate worlds and time periods cohere in ways the reader never anticipates. Here’s a writer who has the extraordinary ability to make both worlds—and all worlds—true simultaneously. And as we turn each page we know there’s always another story waiting, another twist and turn, a dog leg into the past, a time bomb in the present. Go ahead, we want to say. Tell us another one. Serendipity or coincidence, chance or fate. It must all be related. - 2009 Panel of Judges: Persis M. Karim, Toni Mirosevich, & giovanni singleton.