Merit of Distinction Award

Kathleen Brehony

The Third Act

Fiction Romance

Shannon O’Connell is broken. She is sixty-five years old and looks twenty years younger – there’s not much that makes her happy. Her partner of thirty years left her for a mutual friend offering only the cliché: “I love you, but I’m not in love with you.” Her mother is disappearing before her eyes with dementia. And now, the death of her best friend – Linda – from metastatic breast cancer brings her to her knees. In this dark night of the soul – filled with endings — she could not have predicted that this moment could be a beginning. The “Tribe,” Linda’s group of lifelong friends, gather at Shannon’s family’s beachside resort to celebrate her life as they have for countless celebrations over the years. And while Shannon finds comfort in their company, it is an old flame, the beautiful and sexy Elizabeth Matthews, who awakens something in her that was forgotten long ago. Can they overcome the emotional roadblocks they put in their own way? Will falling in love again make this Third Act the best one of all? 

Charles Rogers     

The Brazos Valley Files

Fiction Suspense/Thriller

Whether it is the increased traffic of a game weekend or the issues involved with adding over seventy thousand students to the population of the area annually, life in a college town like College Station, Texas, can present a variety of challenges.

Follow the cases and issues raised in this book as they play out in the Brazos Valley.

Michael Bowler

Forever Boy

Outcast Isaac and popular Stephanie have barely spoken in all their years in school. Now, in the ninth grade, their lives become intertwined with a strange boy from eastern Europe named Drágan Albescu. Everything about Drágan is exotic, from his vintage style of dress to his flowing long hair and delicate features. But he’s also shrouded in great mystery.

He reveals that he’s a fashion model, so Stephanie searches his image on the internet and discovers modeling photos dating back to the 1920’s. Then there’s the valise Drágan carries that’s so heavy Isaac can’t lift it. Drágan also possesses more knowledge and wisdom than all the teachers at school, coupled with the uncanny ability to discern what others long to keep private, a power that particularly frightens Stephanie due to her own dark secrets.

Who is this enigmatic boy who becomes the best friend Isaac ever had? Why do bullies at school suddenly stop their bullying? And what about the dead deer found torn to shreds in the woods? When Isaac and Stephanie learn the full truth about their new friend, they’ll almost wish they hadn’t.

Dennis Roumm

Antietam Affairs

When the door of death closes on a friend or loved one, the living are left to contemplate the mystery; to fascinate over the abstraction. But, if time is a portal, as many believe, and the spirit can walk again on this earth in a new form, it bridges the gap between the dark abyss and reality. Such considerings, then, excite the mind for who we were; how we lived; and, more curiously, were we loved by someone. Though time may wash clean all memories, the passions that lie buried in the subconscious can so securely tether us to a past life that the soul is unquiet, searching for the intangible like that will bring it contentment.
In the summer of 1988, while on vacation, handsome computer whiz Sam Baker becomes drawn into involvement with a group of citizens trying to halt a developer from acquiring an old farm that adjoins the Antietam Battlefield. When a bulldozer unearths the forgotten remains of a Civil War soldier at the site, Sam learns that the grave may be his from a past life. When he and Kelly Gracie, the lovely talented secretary for the citizens’ group, learn that their attorney is really in the employ of the developer, Sam fears the grave may only portend their own demise. Since the unscrupulous developer seems willing to murder to gain ownership of the ground, fate may doom the two to that dark portal once again.

Revealed in vivid, mystical dreams that have been haunting both Sam and Kelly since arriving at Antietam, the story unfolds of a handsome cavalry captain and his affair with the beautiful young lady. He meets an untimely death at Antietam and is buried in an unmarked grave. She, then, dies of pneumonia, her body fatigued from her futile search for his remains.

ANTIETAM AFFAIRS touches the spark of hope for immortality that exists deep in the soul. It offers compassionate justification for lives untimely ended, and why rewards, though often deserved, are not always forthcoming. 

Justin Foster

A Clique To A Cult — status pending

When Glen and Ann Forester’s sixth-grade son becomes the target of abuse at the elite Mansfield Academy, they expect accountability and transparency. Instead, they are met with silence, denial, and a mounting sense of danger. After Stan is publicly humiliated by teacher Mandy Black and dismissed by the school’s headmaster, his parents turn to social media to demand justice-only to ignite a sinister backlash from the school board that spirals from troubling to terrifying.

ARTISTIC EXPRESSION CATEGORY

James Ewings II: Dragon Egg

Mariella Spagnolo:  ਮਾਰੀ ਜੀ ਬਣਨਾ | : Becoming Mari Ji