Fiction
Angela Jackson-Brown
Angela Jackson-Brown is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who is a member of the graduate faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY, and in the fall semester of 2022, she will be joining the creative writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington as an Associate Professor. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She has published her short fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and poetry in journals like The Louisville Journal and the Appalachian Review. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down and The Light Always Breaks. When Stars Rain Down is a highly acclaimed novel that received a starred review from the Library Journal and glowing reviews from Alabama Public Library, Buzzfeed, Parade Magazine, and Women’s Weekly, just to name a few. It was also named a finalist for the David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction.
2024 Fiction Shortlist: Homeward
The country is changing, and her own world is being turned upside down. Nothing—and no one—will ever be the same.
Georgia, 1962. Rose Perkins Bourdon returns home to Parsons, GA, without her husband and pregnant with another man’s baby. After tragedy strikes her husband in the war overseas, a numb Rose is left with pieces of who she used to be and is forced to figure out what she is going to do with the rest of her life. Her sister introduces her to members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—young people are taking risks and fighting battles Rose has only seen on television. Feeling emotions for the first time in what feels like forever, the excited and frightened Rose finds herself becoming increasingly involved in the resistance efforts. And of course, there is also the young man, Isaac Weinberg, whose passion for activism stirs something in her she didn’t think she would ever feel again.
2022 Fiction Shortlist: When Stars Rain Down
When Stars Rain Down tells the story of Opal Pruitt and the summer of 1936 in Parsons, Georgia, where the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan shakes the tight-knit community and challenges the unspoken codes of conduct in their post-Reconstruction era town.
