NMPW News:
Zia Award Chair Jennifer Hull has announced the finalist for this year’s Zia Award, Dede Feldman and Elizabeth Rose.
The Zia Award was started in 1953 to honor an outstanding woman author with a strong connection to New Mexico.
Each year, the award rotates to one of three categories:
- Nonfiction;
- Fiction; and
- Children’s Literature.
The two women authors with ties to New Mexico—or whose action is set in New Mexico—have been named as New Mexico Press Women’s 2024 Zia Book Award finalists in the category of nonfiction. The winner will be announced at a celebratory luncheon Saturday, March 16, 2024.
Dede Feldman arrived in New Mexico as a stranger in 1975. Her path to change took her through alternative newspapers, adobe construction, women’s campaigns and heated grassroots politics. Door-to-door, she learned the wisdom of the street in Albuquerque’s North Valley, which she used in her 16 years as a NM Senator–and beyond. Her finalist book is called Ten More Doors: Politics and the Path to Change.
Elizabeth Rose describes herself as a late developer who began writing in her seventies. Given away by her mother as a bargaining chip so she could keep her lover’s child, Rose was ripped from the land of her birth and all she had ever known at the age of seven and shipped to a paying orphanage in the wilds of Devonshire, England. Since taking up the pen she has published five books. Elizabeth emigrated to New Mexico in 1986 where she has lived ever since. Her finalist book is called When Cows Wore Shoes.
Both will be present at the Scholarship and Zia Award Luncheon Saturday, March 16, at the Isleta Resort to discuss their books.