Chez Robert Giron

Gival Press is pleased to announce that Peter Leach of St. Louis, Missouri, has won the 6th Annual Gival Press Novel Award for his novel The Racial Cleansing of Ste. Genevieve. Leach will receive $3,000.00 and his novel will be published in 2011. His manuscript was read anonymously and chosen by the final judge Tim W. Brown.

"The Racial Cleansing of Ste. Genevieve is an extremely timely novel that depicts the impact of hard times on a small, Depression-era Missouri town. Peter Leach expertly interweaves several storylines that trace the origins of a racist atrocity and its effects on residents, from bottom-dwelling working-class blacks and whites, to ‘French colored’ and merchants higher up the social ladder, to union agitators and mine owners at the top of local society, all of whom wrestle for the town's soul. Featuring a kaleidoscopic cast of noble and base characters, the novel begins as a murder mystery and ends as a powerful indictment of gossip, greed, violence, and vigilantism. With the storyteller's heart of Harper Lee and the sociologist's eye of Frank Norris, Leach reminds us of how far America has come in eighty years, and how far it has yet to go."
—Tim W. Brown, author of Second Acts

Biography:
Peter Leach was born and grew up in St. Louis. He attended Amherst College, spent two years in the Cold War army in Germany, then studied playwriting at Yale Drama School. He has taught at Bryn Mawr College, the University of Louisville and currently teaches in the night-school at Washington University in St. Louis. His short story collection Tales of Resistance won the George Garrett Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 1999. His work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, Indiana Review, River Styx, Panache, Artful Doge, and Kansas Quarterly. One of his stories was reprinted in an O. Henry Awards and another in an NYU Press Best Little Magazine Fiction. His story The Convict's Tale won the Nebraska Review fiction prize. Leach received a National Endowment for the Arts creative writing fellowship.

Finalists:
The Sea of Wise Insects
by Terry Westby-Nunn of Cape Town, South Africa.

Julia and Rodrigo
by Mark Brazaitis of Morgantown, West Virginia.

Hill County People
by Jim Sanderson of Beaumont, Texas.

The Dieter
by Mark Connelly of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
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