Canada Reads authors Jessica Johns and Michelle Good among finalists for 2024 High Plains Book Awards
The awards recognize regional literary works about life on the High Plains in North America
Canada Reads authors Jessica Johns and Michelle Good are among the shortlisted Canadian authors for the 2024 High Plains Book Awards.
Established in 2006, the annual awards recognize regional authors and/or literary works that examine and reflect life on the High Plains in North America. The regions include the Canadian provinces Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan and the American States of North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado and Kansas.
The award program recognizes books in 13 categories, including nonfiction, fiction, poetry, children's books, photography and short stories. The award winners each receive $500 and a commemorative plaque.
Johns is nominated for the Indigenous Writer award for Bad Cree, a debut horror novel that made it to Day Three of this year's Canada Reads competition, championed by athlete and CBC Sports broadcaster Dallas Soonias. Bad Cree centres around a young woman named Mackenzie, who is haunted by terrifying nightmares and wracked with guilt about her sister Sabrina's untimely death.
Johns is a queer nehiyaw aunty with English-Irish ancestry and a member of Sucker Creek First Nation. Johns won the 2020 Writers' Trust Journey Prize for the short story Bad Cree, which evolved into the novel of the same name. Bad Cree also won the MacEwan Book of the Year prize. Johns is currently based in Edmonton.
Good is nominated for both the Indigenous Writer and Nonfiction awards for her book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada.
In Truth Telling, Good explores many issues that are currently affecting Indigenous people in Canada while incorporating her own experience and family's legacy in seven personal essays. She contextualizes contemporary discussions about reconciliation, the emergence of Indigenous narratives and more through historical knowledge, essentially providing a resource to mobilize Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians alike into active change.
Good is a Cree writer and retired lawyer, as well as a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Five Little Indians, her first book, won the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It also won Canada Reads 2022, when it was championed by Ojibway fashion journalist Christian Allaire.
Calgary-based high school student Charlotte Bellows is also nominated for two awards: First Book and Memoir/Creative Nonfiction. She is recognized for her memoir The Definition of Beautiful that follows her own coming-of-age story. Between the ages of 15 and 17, she had to recover from an eating disorder, and explores this journey along with all the consequences it had brought into her life, during a global pandemic.
Here is the full list of Canadian finalists:
First Book
Indigenous Writer
Memoir/Creative Nonfiction
Nonfiction
Short Stories
- This Is Salvaged by Vauhini Vara
Young Reader/Middle Grade
- Coyote Queen by Jessica Vitalis
- The Umbrella House by Colleen Nelson
Young Adult
Art & Photography
- Prairie Interlace by Michele Hardy, Timothy Long, and Julia Krueger
Visit the High Plains Book Awards' website for the full list of finalists.
The winners will be announced on Oct. 5 in Billings, Mont.
