2008 Josiah W. Bancroft Sr. Novel Contest

Winners

Lenore Hart and David Poyer, the final-round novel judges of the Florida First Coast Writers’ Festival, have selected the winners of the 2007 contest.

Winners’ Bios

In 1984, he volunteered to care for AIDS patients, in the nineties worked with the homeless and, beginning in 2001, administered to the dying in the hospice program. Meanwhile, he began studying Spanish and volunteered to work with immigrants.

Through it all, he wrote. All his writing is haunted by AIDS and the hospice experience. Vietnam looms large in his stories, and nearly everything in his work is, in one way or another, about fathers and children. His stories have appeared in many publications and won numerous prizes, but for the last several years, he has concentrated on novels, none so far in print.

Love Comes to King James by Carlyle Johnson
Carlyle Johnson studied music composition and creative writing at the University of Iowa and presently teaches at the State University of West Georgia. The author’s interest in music and biography of composers inspired looking at the story of Mozart from the perspective of his wife. The writer lives in Carrollton, Georgia.

Rime of the Ancient Hippie by Brian McMaster
McMaster was born at the end of World War II in Belfast, Northern Ireland, into a family that had served in the British military as far back as anyone could remember. He immigrated to the United States when he was three and lived among dairy farms in rural New England where his father was a Presbyterian minister. He was educated in a one-room schoolhouse until he was nine when his father became a chaplain in the U.S. Army. From then on, he grew up in military bases in Germany and the U.S. At nineteen he spent a year traveling through Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. He met his wife while hitchhiking, and the two joined the Army together as medics in the early seventies and were assigned as counselors to the returning troops. He has worked as a cab driver in Washington, D.C., an instructor at Purdue University, and as a test engineer on missile warning software for the Department of Defense up until his wife’s death. His son is now a pilot with the U.S. Navy and is currently deployed to the Pacific Fleet.

The Trion Syndrome by Tom Glenn
Tom Glenn was born into a California version of the F. Scott Fitzgerald world of soirées, days at the races, and upscale cocktail lounges. When he was four, his older sister died bringing together his estranged parents. At six, he realized that he would have to take care of himself—his alcoholic mother and playboy father were otherwise engaged. At the same time, he discovered both writing and language and taught himself French and Italian. Six years later, the imprisonment of his lawyer father for embezzlement left the family impoverished. His high school days were spent in Oakland’s ghettos where he raised money with a paper route and a job as delivery boy. He got through college (majoring in drama and music and adding German to his languages) by working as everything from a dishwasher and service station clerk to a barista in an Italian-speaking coffee shop.

Upon graduation from the University of California (Berkeley), he enlisted in the army to study Chinese but was sent for a year to study Vietnamese—a chance event that reshaped his life. For the next twenty-five years, Vietnam was the focus of his attention. After he left the army, he worked for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Embassy in Saigon, spending the better part of thirteen years in Vietnam during the war. He was evacuated under fire during the fall of Saigon in 1975. In subsequent years of working for the government, he became an expert first on Korea, later on China (he had been studying Chinese, first in night classes at Georgetown, later in Vietnam). As he moved into the executive ranks, he published more than twenty articles on management and leadership and took a doctorate from the George Washington University in Public Administration. Meanwhile, he married and fathered four delightful children.

Come into my Web by Larry Kahn
Larry Kahn is a retired attorney now devoted to writing fiction as a second career. He says his friends tease him by accusing him of writing fiction full time for many years. The passion and idealism that infuse his novels were sparked at Yale Law School and fueled by twenty years’ experience in the high stakes world of international mergers and acquisitions. He and his wife have two sons. He has also written a novel entitled The Jinx.

Bridge to Oblivion by William H.Hoffman
Henry Hoffman's meritorious manuscript was Bridge to Oblivion.  Now a resident of Ft. Myers, he is a former public library director and newspaper editor whose fiction and non-fiction works have appeared in a variety of literary and trade publications, including the Midwesterner and Library Journal.  His novel Drums Along the Jacks Fork was published by Echelon Press in 2004.  A subsequent novel Flaherty's Run has been accepted for publication by LBF Books and has been given a preliminary release date of March 2009. Along with his works of fiction, he has contributed articles to America: History and Life (ABC-CLIO), Historical Abstracts of the United States (ABC-CLIO), the Encyclopedia of Flight  (Salem Press), the Encyclopedia of Natural Disasters (Salem Press), the Cyclopedia of Literary Places (Salem Press), and the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Marcel Dekker).

Love Comes to King James by Carlyle Johnson
After assuming the throne of England, James Stuart struggles with plots, politics, and his forbidden attraction for young men.

Rime of the Ancient Hippie by Brian McMaster
Beezel, an aging druggie and former defense consultant, descends into paranoia and flashbacks about his life: hitchhiking and travels in the Middle East, his wife’s death, his therapy, his drug experiences, his work for DoD, his childhood, and ends in his sunset years as a real estate investor.  

The Trion Syndrome by Tom Glenn
50-ish German Literature scholar Dave Bell, a tormented Viet vet with blocked memories of a murder, has an affair with a cute staffer at his college.  Discovered, he’s framed for sexual harassment, divorced by his frigid wife, and fired by his college, after which he flees town, meets his long-lost German son, and wrestles with the demons of his past in an existential crisis in a hut on the shore of a river in New England.

Come into my Web by Larry Kahn
After a woman answers a Web chat invitation and is raped, FBI agent Ben Kravner pursues the shadowy criminal through the Web and elsewhere.

Bridge to Oblivion by William H.Hoffman
After witnessing a beautiful young woman commit suicide on the Skyway Bridge in Tampa, young aspiring PI Adam Fraley investigates her life and death.

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