1st Prize: Ryan Oakley - Best Served Spicy
Ryan Oakley is an attorney for the Department of the Air Force and a retired JAG military officer. Growing up the small town in Imperial, California, he traveled to Alabama for college and law school, and has since lived in four states and the United Kingdom before landing in Arizona. During his 20-years on active duty, he served as a Staff Judge Advocate, prosecutor, Pentagon staff officer, academic instructor, and past editor of The Military Commander and the Law, and The Reporter, a magazine on front-line legal issues.
By chance, he visited the AMW booth at the 2022 Tucson Festival of Books, and decided to (finally) start writing fiction. Last year, he published his first short story, “The Bracero” in Huntingdon College’s literary magazine, The Prelude. Today, Ryan lives with his wife (a school counselor), mother-in-law, four sons, and two unruly dogs in Tucson, Arizona.
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2nd Prize: Elena Smith - Wild Girls in Oatman
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3rd Prize: Conda Douglas - Downpour of Death
A native of Idaho, Conda V. Douglas has lived in Tucson and now resides in Las Cruces, New Mexico. You’d think with that background, Conda would be a natural cowgirl, comfortable astride a horse. Nope. Two of Conda’s childhood experiences were the inspiration for Sure as Shootin’. She’ll leave it up to you to guess which ones.
Conda has published many times, novels, short stories, articles and nonfiction books. But her first and always true love is writing short stories. Her most recent short story publications are Trouble in Tucson, A 2023 Left Coast Crime Anthology and Mild West Mysteries 2: A Dozen Tales of Murder and Mayhem. For more on Conda and her works visit https://www.amazon.com/author/condadouglas.
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Honorable Mention: Jake Jacobs - Hanging Out
AMW President Jake Jacobs has been a member of Arizona Mystery Writers since 2002. A native of the Chicago suburbs, he began his writing career with articles and stories about backgammon. Currently, he has written two books and over four hundred articles on the game. He also co-wrote the screenplay for a kickboxing movie, Ring of Fire. His story “Killing Grandpa” was included in AMW’s anthology A Way With Murder. After moving to Tucson, wrote his mystery novel, The Battered Butterfly.
In 2004 Jake was offered a “three-month” job placing bets on horses in Japan. In 2020, when the temporary job finally ended, he was living in Singapore, and had somehow acquired a wife, a daughter, and a Chihuahua. He moved them all to Tucson (in the middle of Covid).
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