Three PT Authors Awarded Literary Prizes

Three Port Townsend based authors have received significant recognition for their work.

JoAnne Tompkins has been awarded the 2022 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Fiction runner-up for her novel, What Comes After. This award will be officially presented in November in Dayton at a gala event that includes a weekend discussing her work with audiences.

Ms. Tompkins was competing against such notables as Anthony Doerr (Cloud Cuckoo Land) and Patricia Engel (Infinite Country). The winner of the contest was Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, for her N.Y. Times best-seller, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois.

Inspired by the Dayton Peace Accords, The Dayton Literary Peace Prize honors writers whose work uses the power of literature to foster peace, social justice, and global understanding. Launched in 2006, it is recognized as one of the world’s most prestigious literary honors, and is the only international literary peace prize awarded in the United States. This year’s winners will be honored at a gala ceremony hosted by Gilbert King, author of Devil in the Grove and Beneath the Ruthless Sun, in Dayton on Sunday, November 13, 2022. Winners receive a $10,000 honorarium and runners-up receive $5,000.

Additionally, Corky Parker (a contributor to Rainshadow Journal), won the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association (PNWA) Nancy Pearl Award for her memoir La Finca: Love, Loss and Laundry on tiny Puerto Rican Island. Ms Parker recently returned to her Port Townsend home after a sailing trip up the eastern seaboard to Maine.

Also at the PNWA awards, Nancy Leonard was awarded second place in the Literary/Mainstream category for her unpublished book, Cast No Shadow. This is Leonard’s fourth novel. The PNWA awards honor both published books and unpublished books looking for publishers.

Tompkins, Parker and Leonard’s books are available both online and in local bookstores.