I’m thrilled to share that The Last Grand Adventure is a 2019 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Children’s Fiction and Nonfiction. While writing Bea and Pidge’s story, I hoped their journey would celebrate the beauty and rich culture of the parts of the West they traveled through, from Orange County to Atchison, Kansas. It’s deeply meaningful to receive this honor and know that I succeeded in capturing the setting that so inspired me!
About the award: The WILLA Literary Awards honors the best in literature, featuring women’s or girls’ stories set in the West that are published each year. Women Writing the West (WWW), a non-profit association of writers and other professionals writing and promoting the Women’s West, underwrites and presents the nationally recognized award annually at the WWW Fall Conference. The award is named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather, one of the country’s foremost novelists.
For more information and to see the other winners and finalists, visit Women Writing the West.
Congrats!!! Cather was actually born in Virginia, like 40 miles from where I live. I had a college professor who was distantly related to her and we read a lot of Cather that semester!
Thanks! And that’s so cool–I had no idea she was from Virginia. Although now I’m remembering that the narrator in My Antonia had moved from the Blue Ridge Mountains, I think, to the plains?