 The 2020 Nebraska Book Awards will honor authors and publishers of books with a Nebraska connection published in 2019. The 2020 Nebraska Book Award for Fiction goes to a book where, caught in the run up to World War II, Connor considers enlisting, expecting he will go to Europe. Maybe he can protect his sister who's in Paris with the Foreign Service, but it's hard to think about leaving home and family for another years long exile. The book is See Willie See by Faith Colburn, published by Prairie Wind Press. I'd like to begin by thanking the Nebraska Library Commission for providing authors this opportunity to show off their work. I'm particularly gratified to receive the Nebraska Book Award for Fiction for my novel See Willie See. After writing my family memoir, I wanted to think more about families and resiliency and people who just keep showing up. I'd watched my parents trying to make sense of their lives following the twin traumas of the Great Depression and World War II, and I wanted to think about how their very different families growing up affected their outcomes later. I didn't really realize as I started sketching out scenes how relevant any thinking about resilience and trauma would be by the time I'd finished. They tell us, as writers, never to waste anything, and as a result I have a growing file folder entitled Orphans. Insiders snippets of text, a few sentences, paragraphs, even whole chapters I never used. In See Willie See, I'm conserving some of the research I did for my memoir. Specifically, I'm writing again about the unit my dad served with during World War II in the Southwest Pacific. It was 158 Infantry Regiment nicknamed the Bushmasters. Its core was the Arizona National Guard made up of Hispanics, some whites, and representatives from 22 tribes of Native Americans. Their shoulder patch read Cuidado, Spanish for Danger, and depicted a snake wrapped around a machete. The Poisonous Bushmaster they found in Panama as they trained there for the Jungle Warfare. By the time I'd finished researching the memoir, I wanted to keep those guys alive almost as much as my dad had. Although dad died when I was quite young, I really never had an opportunity to ask him about his military service. I doubt he'd have told me much anyway. So I made up a platoon, placed it in George Company, 2nd Battalion in 158th. The journalist in me makes me a little obsessive-compulsive about my stories. Although I don't hesitate to make up characters and situations, I just have to be accurate about the historical context. After all, my undergraduate degree is in journalism and political science. This second of three related novels follows one set in Cleveland during the Great Depression. The third is still in process. While this one is a war novel, it's really about family. In fact, my guys don't see combat until almost two-thirds of the way through the book. That said, I wanted to honor the men who fought in the Pacific. You hear a lot of commemorations of D-Day, but not much about the Pacific, where my guys faced the possibility of a D-Day assault every time they hopped onto a new island, and where their enemies still engaged in torture. But even more than the Japanese, they faced the jungle. With its fevers, malaria and dengue, for example, heat and humidity that would kill a mule, constant rain that drowned out the sound and sight of their enemies and mud up to their knees. I provided my less than willing warrior with a sister, Nora, and centered of Paris with a foreign service months before the German invasion. That was part of Conor's reason for joining the army. He thought he'd get sent to Europe where he could look out for his sister. Of course, I didn't allow that to happen. The two were only able to keep in touch by letters. Sea Willy Sea gave me an opportunity to write about the diverse group of men and the treatment they received from the U.S. Army, both during the war and for many generations previous. I wanted to explore ways in which people from very different cultures could interact to form an effective team of equals. So those were my goals, to explore family through the lens of trauma and to consider racial inequality through the lens of history. Sounds impossibly grand, doesn't it? My most weighty goal, of course, was to tell a compelling story. I hope I've succeeded. Again, thanks to the Center for the Book, Nebraska Library Commission, for conducting the contest and awards ceremony under very difficult circumstances. And that's it for me. Thanks for listening. Recognized with a Fiction Honor Series Award are two connected books. The first starts when an extinct disease reemerges from the melting Alaskan permafrost and causes madness in its victims. The books are The Line Between, A Thriller, and A Single Light, A Thriller, both by Tosca Lee, published by Howard Books. Hi, this is Tosca Lee. And I just want to say thank you so much to the Nebraska Center for the Book and the Nebraska Book Awards for the judges' honors for my two books, The Line Between and also its sequel, A Single Light, which recently came out in paperback. I'm so excited that a big portion of these books has been set in Nebraska as a Nebraska farmwife and the daughter of a native Nebraskan and a great, great, great, three greats, granddaughter of one of Nebraska's early women homesteaders. I'm very proud to be able to include my home state in these stories. A little bit about the book. The book came out in 2019, and it is a pandemic story. So if I said to say 2020 has been a little bit weird for me and my family living through this current pandemic here at the farm south of Fremont. But anyway, this is a story of hope, and it is a story of perseverance and a better future. It is the story of a young woman named Winter Loth, who has just left a doomsday cult here in the Midwest that she grew up in much of her life, just in time to face a pandemic and the apocalypse that she has been taught most of her life to expect to see coming. How I came across this idea was I'd always been interested in cults, but also in the idea of starting over after leaving a cult. And I had also read a newspaper story about a disease that emerged from the melting permafrost in Siberia, and how it made an entire village sick. And I found that frightening and fascinating at the same time. And so my publisher at Simon and Schuster suggested I put those two ideas together, which I thought at first, how can this possibly work out? But it turned into what I feel is a very human story of survival in a time of frightening change. A big, big thank you. Big thank you also to my friends in Nebraska, my family, and also to Nebraska libraries. I had the great pleasure of visiting so many wonderful libraries to talk about these books and to interact with readers, which is my favorite thing to do and which I missed so much this year. And I look forward to the day that I get to do that again and get to come join you and talk about our love of books together. So in the meantime, I hope you are well. I hope you are safe. And I just want to say massive, massive thank you from the bottom of my heart for recognizing these books and me as a Nebraska author. So thank you very, very much.