The winners of the 2018 Joseph Badal Fiction Contest recently read their winning work with Joseph Badal present during the reading, who is the award-winning author that sponsored the contest.\u00a0Badal is an Amazon #1 Best-Selling Author and has been named One of the 50 Great Authors You Should Be Reading. He has won numerous awards, including the NM\/AZ Book Awards Best Fiction-Mystery\/Suspense for The Lone Wolf Agenda, and The Tony Hillerman Prize for Best Fiction Book for Ultimate Betrayal. He has won Gold and Silver Medals from the Military Writers Society of America for his writing.<\/p>\n
Our second place undergraduate winner,\u00a0Mia Coleman\u00a0has degrees in biology and creative writing. She is still currently pursuing undergraduate coursework and is applying for medical school this coming summer. She still plans to write when she becomes a doctor.<\/p>\n
Our first place undergraduate winner, Olivia Padilla is a native Burque\u00f1a. She is a senior double majoring in English and International Studies, with a minor in Spanish. She has studied abroad twice (Italy and Mexico), is the Vice President of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), and is the current UNM Princess (UNM Homecoming Queen 1st Runner Up). This semester, Olivia is a reader for the Blue Mesa Review and has published a blog post titled Let the Movida Live. She has also interviewed author Francisco Cant\u00fa on his latest work. The interview will be published in the upcoming issue of the Blue Mesa Review.<\/p>\n
Our second place graduate\u00a0winner, Tatiana Duvanova is a fiction writer and a Fulbright alumna. Originally from Russia, she is currently located in Albuquerque where she is pursuing her MFA in creative writing and serves as Fiction Editor for\u00a0Blue Mesa Review<\/em>. Her stories have appeared in\u00a0Litro\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0Southword.<\/em><\/p>\n Our first place graduate\u00a0winner, JJ Conn\u00a0is a first year in the MFA for creative non-fiction and is encouraged in this endeavor by her wife Morgan, her dog Malcolm who gives her dragons, her cat Pez who lies on her keyboard, and her cat Jacks who, well, really isn\u2019t encouraging at all and hisses at her for no reason.\u00a0 She currently holds a BFA in printmaking, photography and illustration, a BA in Religious Studies and an MA in Art Education.\u00a0 Recently,\u00a0JJ\u00a0became a Girl Scout leader and is trying to instill in her troop a love of art and writing while recording their antics for story ideas.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The winners of the 2018 Joseph Badal Fiction Contest recently read their winning work with Joseph Badal present during the reading, who is the award-winning author that sponsored the contest.\u00a0Badal is an Amazon #1 Best-Selling Author and has been named One of the 50 Great Authors You Should Be Reading. He has won numerous awards, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1453,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-announcements","category-awards"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1449"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1534,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1449\/revisions\/1534"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/english.unm.edu\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}