Evelyn Thurman Award recipients for Fall 2013 are Silas House & Neela Vaswani for their co-written book Same Sun Here.
On November 22, 2013, WKU Libraries hosted an awards luncheon in the Kentucky Building to honor the two winners of the Evelyn Thurman Young Readers Book Award for 2013: Silas House and Neela Vashwani, co-authors of Same Sun Here, a novel for middle graders made up of letters exchanged between an Indian immigrant girl in New York City and a rural Kentucky coal miner’s son.
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Congratulations to the 2013 Award Winners |
Silas House and Neela Vaswani |
A review for School Library Journal says, “This tender and breathtakingly honest story about unlikely friendships and finding common ground will captivate readers… In an era when social media permeates every area of our lives, Meena and River’s old-fashioned camaraderie through letters feels refreshing and true. Audiences will revel in this lovely story about a boy and girl who are not so different from one another after all.” The selection committee was very enthusiastic about this year’s winners. Sean Kinder, WKU Librarian and Chair of the Selection Committee, shared the following comment: “There are moments for both protagonists in the story that are extremely poignant. Whether facing the threat of mountain-top removal or of eviction from a tenement—these young, disparate characters are united by their courage, strength, and integrity.” Silas House—author and winner of numerous awards including the E.B. White Award, the Audie Award, the Nautilus Award and two-time winner of the Kentucky Novel of the Year–was born and raised in Eastern Kentucky. House serves as the NEH Chair of Appalachian Literature at Berea College and on the fiction faculty at Spalding University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. House is a former commentator for NPR’s “All Things Considered” and a former contributing editor for No Depression magazine. He is also one of Nashville’s most in-demand press kit writers. A former writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University, he is the creator of the Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. Neela Vaswani is author of the short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends, and a memoir, You Have Given Me a Country. She is the recipient of the American Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, the ForeWord Book of the Yeargold medal, the Nautilus Book Award gold medal, an Audie Award, and many other honors. Her fiction and nonfiction have been widely anthologized and published in journals such as Epoch, Shenandoah, and Prairie Schooner. She has been a Visiting-Writer-in-Residence at more than 100 institutions. She has a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies, lives in New York City, and teaches at Manhattanville College’s MFA in Writing Program and Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program in Louisville, Kentucky. Both House and Vaswani will be honored at an awards luncheon at the Kentucky Museum in November. While in the area, both authors will visit local schools as part of the Southern Kentucky Book Fest’s “Fall into Books” program. House will also talk at the Warren County Public Library on Thursday, November 21 at 6 p.m. To learn more about the authors, go to silashouse.org and neelavaswani.com. For more on Evelyn Thurman, go to wku.edu/library/awards/thurman_bio.php. This program is made possible by the Evelyn Thurman Children’s Author Fund, the Southern Kentucky Book Fest partnership, and WKU Libraries. View photos at the award luncheon or listen to the award luncheon Podcast. |