November 17, 2009

BCU Professor’s Novel Earns Nashville Book Festival Award

SIOUX CITY, Iowa – Tricia Currans-Sheehan’s The River Road: A Novel in Stories was named a finalist in fiction and received Honorable Mention in the Nashville Book Festival Awards, which were announced earlier this month.

New Rivers Press, a 40-year-old independent press which began in New York City and moved to Minneapolis, nominated Dr. Currans-Sheehan’s novel. Set in Northwest Iowa, The River Road is a coming of age novel in stories about “Brigid” who is being raised by her emotionally distant father, a farmhand, on the river road. 

The Nashville Book Festival Awards are given for fiction, nonfiction, young adult novels, biography/autobiography, how-to and photography/art.

A professor of English and writing at Briar Cliff University, Dr. Currans-Sheehan is editor of The Briar Cliff Review, an award-winning national literary/cultural magazine. Her first book, The Egg Lady and Other Neighbors, a collection of short stories, recently won the Headwaters Literary Competition, sponsored by New Rivers Press.

The author has had stories published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Fiction, Connecticut Review, Portland Review, Puerto del Sol, Calyx, Forum, Short Fiction by Women, Heritage of the Great Plains Journal, South Dakota Review, Kalliope, Wisconsin Review, among many others.

She won the Duff Award for the Pursuit of Excellence, the 1997 Iowa Literary Contest, the Nancy Pickard Fiction Contest and has been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.

Briar Cliff University is a Catholic institution with an enrollment of more than 1,100 students from 28 states.  Students are educated in the Franciscan tradition of excellence in the liberal arts and career preparation in an environment of care and compassion. For more information, please visit www.briarcliff.edu.

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