Terry Marshall’s civil rights novel, Soda Springs won first prize for Multicultural Fiction in the 2013 Beverly Hills Book Award contest.
In announcing the award, contest president and CEO Ellen Reid wrote, “Your book, Soda Springs: Love, Sex, and Civil Rights, truly embodies the excellence that this award was created to celebrate, and we salute you and your fine work.”
The contest was open to books published in English from 2008 through 2013. Soda Springs was published in 2011. The novel is illustrated by Chuck Asay, a nationally syndicated editorial cartoonist.
Marshall’s book previously won first prize for “Best Illustration in Fiction” and was a finalist in in both “Adult Multicultural Literature” and “Teen Literature” in the 2011 Global eBook Awards competition. An earlier draft of Soda Springs won first place in general fiction from the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers.
Soda Springs tells a rollicking coming of age tale that weaves love and sex into the previously untold story of the Mexican-American battle for civil rights in the Sixties. Along the way it confronts those topics our mothers told us to steer clear of in polite company: sex . . . religion . . . politics . . . racial conflict.”
The story in a nutshell: after a hormone-driven college kid fails to sell Martin Luther King’s civil rights crusade to his tiny hometown of Soda Springs in the fictional “Sangre de Cristo Valley,” he plunges unwittingly into the cross-hairs of a bare-knuckle battle for Mexican-American equality.
Published by Friesen Press, Soda Springs is available in hardback, paperback, and electronic versions, both at some bookstores and through the internet.
Marshall has been a reporter, editor, and free-lance writer, and has received a number of awards for his news articles, features, and editorials.
In addition to several published short stories, he is author of The Whole World Guide to Language Learning, a text on how to learn unwritten foreign languages. He studied in Mexico, Spain and Peru, and holds a Ph.D. in Rural Sociology from Cornell University. He currently lives in Las Vegas.
Asay graduated from Adams State University. An inveterate doodler, he has drawn his conservative, Christianity-inspired––and prize winning––cartoons for The Taos News, The Colorado Springs Sun, and the Gazette in Colorado Springs. Creators Syndicate currently distributes his editorial cartoons nationally. Asay lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Excerpts from Soda Springs, as well as background information and photos on the 1963 civil rights movement not included in the book, may be found on the author’s website: www.TerryMarshallFiction.com.