Members of the Hot Springs Writers Critique Group awarded
Members of Hot Springs Writers Critique Group recently attended the 51st Annual Ozark Creative Writers Conference in Eureka Springs and participated in workshops, publisher’s pitches, and author book sales.
An awards banquet was held the final night where Charles “Chap” Harper won one of the five Grand Conference Awards, the Publish Your Book Award. It came with a standard book contract from OGHMA Press. Harper’s winning entry was for his completed manuscript, “Jungle Jane,” the story of an English girl who survived a shipwreck and led an expedition up the Congo to save a pygmy village from smallpox. Harper is the published author of “Under Cuba,” “Once Upon a Reef,” “Once Upon the Congo,” and “Beer, Bait, and Ammo.”
Bitty Martin won a second place Conference Award and prize money in the High Hill Press Award for The New York Times’ next best-seller, any genre. Martin’s entry, “Fifteen Toes,” is a work in progress based on the 1966 true story of a teenage girl’s violent death and the man who terrorized her Southern town. This story has stayed with Martin since she was a student at Hot Springs Central Junior High School and her 13-year-old friend, Cathie Ward, fell off a horse and was dragged to death at Blacksnake Ranch. It is told through information gained from research, personal contacts and interviews about Ward’s short life and the Blacksnake Ranch owner, Frank “Sonny” Davis, who seven months later murdered his young wife at the Redbird Gas Station and Laundromat on Central Avenue.
Jane Dews Benkart received a publisher’s invitation to submit “Sunrise,” a story about four women living in an old Houston mansion seeking new beginnings. She is currently working on a new book, “Cuckoo’s Song.” Also attending the conference was the Hot Springs Writers Founder, Nancy Smith Gibson. The fifth book in her “Tales From the Brazos” series will be released in December, and the sixth in early 2018.