Book Prize Winner is Rosemary McGuire

The winner of this year's River Teeth Nonfiction Book Prize is Rosemary McGuire. Her memoir Out West: A Season on Water is a coming of age tale set in the Alaskan fishing industry. The manuscript was selected by final judge Andre Dubus III, author of six books including House of Sand and Fog, and the memoir Townie.

McGuire was born in 1977, on a homestead outside Fairbanks, Alaska. Later, her parents moved to southeast Alaska, where her father was a commercial fisherman. McGuire graduated from Shimer College with a Great Books degree in 1999 and later hitch-hiked to the coast to look for work as a fisherman herself. Fishing was her world for the next fifteen years, although McGuire also attended graduate school at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, married and divorced. In 2015, she published a book of short stories, The Creatures at the Absolute Bottom of the Sea. These days McGuire still lives by the water, although she works now as a research technician in the Arctic and as a skiff driver in Antarctica.  

McGuire will receive a cash prize of $1,000 for her winning manuscript, which will be published by The University of New Mexico Press and made available in the spring of 2017.

River Teeth thanks all who entered the 2015 book contest. Many fine manuscripts were received and considered. All who entered the contest will receive a complimentary one-year subscription to River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative.

Details about next year's competition will be posted on the River Teeth website.