The Morgan County African American Museum and its partners announce the winners of the Raymond Andrews Prize for Creative Writing contest for the 2021-2022 academic year. Novelist Vern Smith has made his selections from Minalists chosen by a panel of readers.
Peyton Triplett, a Junior at Morgan County High School, wins top prize with her story “Cinderella (Or Rather What Really Happened, but Don’t Tell the Grimm Brothers I Told You).” Vern Smith says, the “story was an engaging read, imaginative and whimsical in the tradition of Raymond Andrews himself.” Triplett is followed by Levi Hubbard, Gretchen Floyd, and Litzy Delgado-Acuna. These students win a combined total of $600 in prize money. Other finalists include Elijah Freeman, Anna Arthur, and Ella-Ryan Cottrell.
The Minal prizes include: Peyton Triplett, $400; Levi Hubbard, $100; Gretchen Floyd, $50; and Litzy Delgado-Acuna, $50. Cash prizes will be awarded to the winning students at a public reading on Tuesday, May 3, 2022 at The Sinclair, in Madison. The reading takes place at 6 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
The purpose of the contest is to foster excitement for creative writing among area youth. Entries are judged blindly by a team of volunteer readers. Each story is read by at least two judges. Judges used a standardized rating system. Entries earning the most points from the reading pool were passed along to our 2022 guest judge, Vern Smith, who then made the Minal selections.
Vern Smith, guest judge for the 2022 contest, is a prize-winning journalist, author, and screenwriter. He has contributed to or co-authored five books. His novel The Jones Men was cited as an influence by writers of The Wire. A former Newsweek Atlanta Bureau Chief and national correspondent, his work has also appeared in Emerge, The London Sunday Times, Ebony, GEO, The Crisis, The History Channel Magazine, and other publications.
Raymond Andrews, the namesake for the prize, was born in the Plainview Community of Morgan County in 1934. He published three novels and four other books. Almost all of them are set in the fictional Mictional
Muskhogean County, which is a stand-in for Morgan County. Andrews is a member of the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame. He died in 1991.
For more information contact Jesse Freeman or The Morgan County African American Museum.
– Contributed