For the first time since it was established in 1992, the annual James Jones First Novel Fellowship has selected two writers, rather one, to jointly share the title of Fellow. Thomas Andrew Green of Kennesaw, Georgia, and Julie Ries of the Hudson Valley area of New York, have each been awarded $9,000 for the top prize. The judges did not award first or second-runners up prizes this year. There were 627 submissions.
The James Jones First Novel Fellowship is co-sponsored by the James Jones Literary Society and the Maslow Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Green received the award for his novel, Soon as I Find Jake, the story of Finn Kibbett, a neophyte language instructor who leaves his home in the States in the summer of 1935 to take a position at the Sorbonne in Paris, teaching his father’s native language, German. With the recent death of the President of the Weimar Republic, and the power grab by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, the political situation in Europe becomes dire. Paris falls to the Nazis, and Finn struggles to adapt to the new reality with both his safety and his life uncertain.
Green’s work has appeared in Amelia, Crosscurrents, Southwest, Negative Capability, Apple Valley Review, The Madison Review, and others. Winner of the Society of Southwest Authors Short Story Competition, he attended Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont as well as Ploughshares magazine/Emerson College’s International Fiction Writing Seminar at Kasteel Well in the Netherlands. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Arkansas in Philosophy, and a Master’s in American Indian Studies from the University of Arizona. Contact: Tagreen97@yahoo.com.
Thomas Andrew Green
Ries was named a Fellow for her novel, The Hunger Bride, which is based on the lives of two historical figures in early 20th century San Francisco. It explores the alliance between Wu Mei Lin, a young Chinese peasant who risks her life for a forbidden education but is betrayed and trafficked to the US, and Dina Mackenzie, the inheritor of a failing sheep ranch, whose dark family legacy—syphilis—compels her to break her engagement and become a settlement worker. At the Presbyterian Chinese Mission Home, where both women find a makeshift refuge, they face a missionary who seeks to consolidate her power at their expense; harrowing medical treatments in the days before penicillin; and the turbulence of an embattled Chinatown. In a climate of xenophobia and sexual repression, the pair fight for agency, love—and ultimately, survival.
Ries’ fiction has appeared in Guernica, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, La Piccioletta Barca, and Ark/angel, and was long-listed for the Fish Short Story Prize by Colum McCann. She holds an MFA from New York University and a BA from Yale University, and has attended writing workshops through A Public Space, Hedgebrook, and Beyond Baroque, among others. Additionally, she’s served as the manager of an Art Deco historic monument in Los Angeles, and taught English and expository writing on the high school and undergraduate levels. Contact: julierieswriter@gmail.com
Julie Ries Photo credit: Franco Vogt
Final judges for the Fellowship were: Nancy McKinley, Ph.D., a founding member of the fiction faculty at the Maslow Family Creative Writing Program, a novelist and short story writer; David Nicholson, book reviewer, short story and non-fiction writer, and Virginia Pye, novelist and short story writer.
THE JAMES JONES 