Announcing the Wyoming Arts Council’s 2022 Blanchan and Doubleday Writing Award Winners
Hollie Sambrooks of Laramie and Brandon McQuade of Gillette are the recipients of the Wyoming Arts Council’s 2022 Blanchan and Doubleday writing awards.
Sambrooks won the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award for the entry, “The Year She Came,” and McQuade received the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award for the entry, “If the Soul Could Speak”
Honorable mentions were awarded to Leslie Beadles of Cheyenne and Pamela Galbreath of Laramie for the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award. Megan Kohli of Moose and Hollie Sambrooks of Laramie received honorable mentions for the Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award.
The Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award and the Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award are made possible through the generosity of a private donor. The Blanchan award is given for the best writing that is informed by a relationship with the natural world; the Doubleday award is given for the best writing by a woman writer. Both awards are designed to bring attention to writers in Wyoming who have not yet received wide recognition for their work, and to support emerging writers at crucial times in their careers.
Hollie Sambrooks moved to Wyoming in 2001 from the farmlands of Australia. She loves to
travel and being in a new place often inspires her sporadic writing. Hollie writes down the things
that haunt her and the things that she cannot bear to forget, and she finds that a touch of magical realism can be more truthful to the heart of a story than fact. She lives in Laramie with her husband and daughter.
Brandon McQuade is a graduate of the University of New Brunswick (BA) and Trinity College Dublin (M.Phil). He is the founding editor of “Duck Head Journal,” an online, non-profit quarterly publication. His poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in “Dreich,” “Red Eft Review,” “34 Orchard,” “Vita Brevis” and “Eunoia Review.” McQuade’s debut chapbook, “Bleeding Heart,” was published by Kelsay Books (2021), and his debut collection, “Mango Seed,” was recently published by Scurfpea Publishing. He lives in Gillette, Wyoming with his wife and their children.
The juror for this year was Debra Magpie Earling. Debra is the author of, “Perma Red” and “The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.” which will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2023. An earlier version of the latter, written in verse, was produced as an artist book during the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition. She has received both a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She retired from the University of Montana where she was named professor emeritus in 2021. She is Bitterroot Salish.
The Blanchan and Doubleday awards program is an annual competition administered by the Wyoming Arts Council. For more information about the awards visit the Arts Council website wyomingartscouncil.org or call 307-247-6673.
Caption: Hollie Sambrooks (left), the recipient of the 2022 Frank Nelson Doubleday Memorial Writing Award and Brandon McQuade (right), the recipient of the 2022 Neltje Blanchan Memorial Writing Award.