The Diana Woods Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction

Special Guest Judge, Natashia Déon:

I can hear grandma laugh. I can feel hunger, disappointment at empty cabinets, hear the landlines in the house ringing from bill collectors wanting to be paid. I knew why people in this life drank. I could see her dad go down after hopping over a water balloon and the hot mess that followed. Was I watching this in some video? Or, was I reading it? And by the time I finished this piece, told by some stranger in the future looking back, I had hope. “Grandma Lake” is a story that engages all senses and pulls you in until what you’ve read feels like your own memory.

Natashia Deón is a two-time NAACP Image Award Nominee for Outstanding Literature, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award Nominee in Fiction, a practicing criminal attorney, judge for the LA Times Book Prize in Fiction and Debut Fiction, and author of the critically acclaimed novels, GRACE and The Perishing. GRACE was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times and awarded Best Debut Novel by the American Library Association’s Black Caucus. A PEN America Fellow, Deón has also been awarded fellowships and residencies at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Prague’s Creative Writing Program, Dickinson House in Belgium and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a professor of creative writing at UCLA and Antioch University. Her personal essays have been featured in The New York Times, Harper’s, The Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Bazaar, American Short Fiction, Buzzfeed and other places.