The Eugene and Marilyn Glick
Indiana Authors Awards

Ed Fujawa was born in Boulder, Colorado, but spent his formative years in Greenwood, Indiana and graduated from Greenwood Community High School. He then attended Indiana University – Bloomington and graduated in 2004 before leaving the state for law school.  Returning to Indiana in 2007, he and his wife Ashlee lived in downtown Indianapolis before moving to the Butler-Tarkington neighborhood in 2008. 

Born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, Tess studied English with an honors concentration in creative writing at the University of Notre Dame, where she won a theater award for her play and the Ernest Sandeen Award for her poetry collection. She left Indiana at the age of twenty-two to pursue a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at New York University, where she was a Lillian Vernon Fellow. There, she began working on The Rabbit Hutch, a polyphonic ode to postindustrial Indiana. She is currently a Writer in Residence at New York University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate students. Her fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, Freeman’s, Joyland, The Iowa Review, Granta, and other publications. She now lives between Brooklyn and upstate New York. 

Brittany Means was born dead and then lived for a while in a car and then later in a huge black barn out in the cornfields of rural Indiana. A graduate of Ball State University and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, her debut memoir, Hell If We Don’t Change Our Ways, earned a Kirkus starred review and was picked as a Best Book of Fall 2023 by PEOPLE magazine. Currently, Means lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she keeps chickens, edits, and watches many many horror movies. 

Rebecca McKanna’s short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 and recognized as distinguished in The Best American Short Stories 2019. She has been published in Colorado Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and Third Coast, among other publications. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Indianapolis. Don’t Forget the Girl is her first novel. 

A longtime Indiana resident, George Kalamaras was born on Chicago’s South Side. Three of his four grandparents emigrated to the U.S. from Greece and settled in the Chicago area. George moved to northwest Indiana with his family in 1960 and has been an Indiana resident since, except for a ten-year stint primarily for graduate study. 

George served as Indiana’s Poet Laureate during 2014 and 2015. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne (formerly Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne), where he taught for thirty-two years, retiring in 2022. He is the author of twenty-four collections of poetry—fifteen full-length books and nine chapbooks—and he has three more full-length collections forthcoming in 2025 and 2026.  

Kekla Magoon is the New York Times bestselling author of over thirty books for children and teens, often exploring themes of identity, community, empowerment, and social justice.

A community Afrofuturist, librarian, and teacher, Maurice Broaddus has had more than a hundred short stories published in such places as Lightspeed Magazine, Black Panther: Tales from Wakanda, Out There Screaming (edited by Jordan Peele), The End of the World As We Know It: New Tales of Stephen King’s The Stand, Asimov’s, Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Apex Magazine. Broaddus has more than a dozen novels in print; his latest include Black Panther: T’Challa Declassified, Unfadeable, Sweep of Stars, Breath of Oblivion, and A City Dreaming. Born in London, Broaddus moved to Franklin, Indiana, when he was six years old and to Indianapolis a couple years later.

Janna Matthies writes because there is an overflow of beauty all around us—in nature, art, and relationships. A Hoosier native and graduate of Northwestern University, Janna is the author of the 2024 Indiana Authors Award-winning picture book Here We Come! and The Goodbye Cancer Garden, which won “Best Foreign Children’s Book” at the Sharjah International Book Festival. She now lives in Indianapolis with her family, teaching elementary music and caring for her dog, Juneau.v

Jennifer Blackmer’s plays have been seen in productions across the country. She is the recipient of the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theatre Award for Emerging American Playwright, the 2024 Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust/ATCA Citation for I Carry your Heart with Me, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation/Tribeca Film Institute prize for her screenplay version of Human Terrain, the Joseph Jefferson Award for Best Adaptation for Alias Grace, the David Mark Cohen National Playwriting Award, the 2020 Indiana Women of Achievement Award, and the Gold Medallion from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. Jennifer is an Indiana native from New Palestine and currently serves as Professor of Theatre at Ball State University in Muncie, where she teaches classes in playwriting, storytelling, feminist theatre and others.

Susan Neville is the author of six works of creative nonfiction: Fabrication: Essays on Making Things and Making Meaning; Twilight in Arcadia; Iconography: A Writer’s Meditation; Butler’s Big Dance; Sailing the Inland Sea, and Light. Her collections of short fiction and hybrid fiction  include The Town of Whispering Dolls, winner of the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Innovative Fiction, In the House of Blue Lights, winner of the Richard Sullivan Prize; Invention of Flight, winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction; and Indiana Winter. She lives in Indianapolis.

Tony Brewer is a poet and audio artist from Bloomington, where he is executive director of the Spoken Word Stage at the 4th Street Festival of the Arts and Crafts and co-producer of the Writers Guild Spoken Word Series and the Urban Deer Performance Series. He has published 12 books and chapbooks, including most recently Centaur (with Jonathan S Baker, Dark Heart Press) and Good Job, Lightning (Stubborn Mule Press).