<\/p>\n
The Whiting Awards jury has announced this year\u2019s ten winners in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Two winners picking up the $50,000 prize are from Texas. <\/span>Merritt Tierce<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span> won for fiction with her debut novel, <\/span>Love Me Back<\/em>, set in the world of Dallas\u2019 high-end restaurants and low-paid waitresses. The other writer, poet <\/span>Vanessa Ang\u00e9lica Villareal<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/span>, is also a winner for her debut, a poetry collection, <\/span>Beast Meridian<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n These days, Tierce lives in LA, writing for television\u2019s Orange is the New Black<\/em>, and working on a second literary effort, this one, the Whiting website says, is \u201ca book of autofiction about men, sex, writing, the internet, depression, being a woman, physicality, and television.\u201d<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Villareal is from the Rio Grande Valley. Her haunting, surreal poetry has been published in The Boston Review<\/em> and The Academy of American Poets<\/em>. She\u2019s at work on her doctorate in English literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Whiting Awards jury has announced this year\u2019s ten winners in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama. Two winners picking up the $50,000 prize are from Texas.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1786,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,9,8,120,74],"class_list":["post-1787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-awards","tag-lonestarliterarylife","tag-lonestarliterarycom","tag-newsbriefs","tag-poetrynews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}