The Winners and Finalist of the Kenneth Johnston Nonfiction Book Contest

2024 Judge, Tracy Robert, Chooses Crevice as winner!

Rick Holinger grew up overlooking Lake Michigan on Chicago’s Gold Coast but soon left that privileged lifestyle for the life of a high school teacher living in the western ’burbs with his artist wife, Tia (who also taught secondary school), and two children, Jay and Molly, now grown. He’d wake up early and write for an hour or two before his first class, leading to poems, stories, and essays eventually finding homes in The Southern Review, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Hobart, North American Review, The Iowa Review, Western Humanities Review, Witness, Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua, and elsewhere.

JoDean Nicolette is a writer, physician, and teacher. A graduate of the Stanford University School of Medicine and the Pacific University Master of Fine Arts Program, she believes in the healing power of both nature and the written word. She sits on the Board of Directors for the Missoula Writing Collaborative, an organization that teaches love of writing in rural schools, and she partners with Pacific University to produce The Body Chronicles, a program designed to help authors write about the experience of wellness and illness. 

Anna Redsand shares many characteristics of other Adult Third Culture Kids (ATCKs), having spent most of her developmental years in a culture other than that of her parents. Perhaps the most notable of those traits is restlessness; she has moved seventy-one times, lived in three countries on as many continents, in all four hemispheres, and in eighteen US communities. She has also enjoyed living on the road. Life between postcolonial Diné (Navajo) and White cultures has deeply influenced her writing.

Tracy Robert, a native of Southern California, has taught writing for four decades. She won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize for Fiction (novella), was a finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and has published in various periodicals and anthologies, notably Forever Sisters (Pocket Books), When Last on the Mountain (Holy Cow! Press), Is It Hot in Here, or Is It Just Me? (Social Justice Anthologies) and Unbound: Composing Home (New Rivers Press). Her book of linked novellas, Flashcards and The Curse of Ambrosia, released in October 2015, was winner of the Many Voices Project Prize at New Rivers Press. 

Jacquelyn “Jacsun” Shah holds: A.B. English–Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, Rutgers U; M.A. English, Drew U; M.F.A. and Ph.D.–English literature/creative writing–poetry, U of Houston. She has received grants from the University of Houston, the Houston Arts Alliance, and the Puffin Foundation, and she was Literal Latté’s 2018 Food Verse Contest winner. Her publications include a chapbook, small fry; a full-length book, What to Do with Red; and poems in various journals.