Winner of the 2018 Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction

The Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) is pleased to announce the winners of the 2018 GLCA New Writers Award for fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction. Now in its 49th year, the New Writers Award confers recognition on promising writers who have published a first volume in one of the three genres. Winning writers receive invitations to visit GLCA member colleges, where they give readings, meet and talk about writing with students and faculty members. The 2018 winner for Creative Non-fiction is Hilary Plum, Watchfires, published by Rescue Press. Our GLCA judges note: "Urgent and probing, generous and judicious, Hilary Plum’s Watchfires asks the big questions: what does it mean to be at war, to be sick, to be in love, to be family? This book possesses a beautiful lyricism, a deeply ruminative poeticism, and a steadily building sense of conviction that war and love, disease and health are perhaps more close than might make us comfortable. In this paradoxically expansive and compressed memoir, Plum seeks correspondences between personal pain and public trauma – from chronic illness to terrorism, from the truth-telling of art to the obfuscation of politics. It’s a fascinating and intimate work that can be read as memoir, as essay, as poetry, as history, or as meditation. It is important in terms of craft and also in subject. Compelling, moving, and formally inventive narrative, it is a book that bears rereading."