March Member News

Women Writing the West members are awesome, prolific, award-winning, forward looking women! Congratulations to you all for your accomplishments!

Cj Fosdick The Accidental Wife (Wild Rose Press) It is calculated that you have six people in the world who look like you! Chances are less than 10 percent that you will meet one of them in your lifetime. How does a modern day intelligent 30-year old (determined) spinster become an instant mother—and the look-alike wife to an ancestor who lived 130 years ago?

Margaret Gooch, The West, The West. In a setting where environmentalists clash with ranchers over grazing rights, what are the chances that agency intern Joan Aquero and rancher Zeb Enwright will trust their growing attraction? As a novice but aspiring Westerner, Joan compares herself with Ann Bassett, the “Queen of the Cattle Rustlers” (and a real person), who by feuding with a large-scale cattleman in former times made a name for herself in the region. Ann’s marriage to a man initially allied with her enemies was unsuccessful; should that outcome be a warning to Joan? How will Joan come to understand the grazing rights issue, respond to the threat against her it provokes, and resolve her feelings for Zeb as she strives to make a place for herself in the West?

Sharman Russell, Teresa of the New World is a young adult novel about the fictional daughter of the Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and a Capoque mother from the coastal tribes of Texas. Set in the dreamscape of the American Southwest in the sixteenth century, the story explores the turbulence of First Contact as Teresa struggles to find herself in the New World.

AWARDS 

Cynthia Leal Massey has won a 2015 San Antonio Conservation Society Publication Award for her latest book, Death of a Texas Ranger, A True Story of Murder and Vengeance on the Texas Frontier. The book, set in 1870s Texas, is about Texas Ranger John Green, who was slain in northwest Bexar County in 1873. The killer was alleged to be Cesario Menchaca, one of three Rangers of Mexican descent under Green’s command.

Several WWW members are Western Writers of America Spur awards: Nancy Oswald winner for Edward Wynkoop: Soldier and Indian Agent in Western Juvenile Fiction, and finalists Sandra Dallas for Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky in Western Juvenile Fiction, and Jane Kirkpatrick for  A Light in theWilderness, Western Historical Novel.

Karen Casey Fitzjerrell, Forgiving Effie Beck, has won an EPIC award in Historical fiction.In this Will Rogers Gold Medallion Award-winning work of fiction Mike LeMay, a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer arrives in a small Texas town days before the town eccentric, Effie Beck, is reported missing. While conducting his interviews, Mike learns that the enigmatic, elderly Miss Effie has moved through the lives of the town’s populace "like brown smoke" after having suffered a harsh childhood under the discipline of a cruel father.