Webster Alumna Named National Book Award Finalist
October 02, 2024
"Whiskey Tender," a debut memoir by Webster University alumna Deborah Jackson Taffa, was named one of five finalists for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, the National Book Foundation announced on October 1.
Taffa graduated from Webster in 2011 with a BA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. "Whiskey Tender" tells of Taffa's childhood and teenage experiences in a mix-race family on Yuma and Navajo reservations in California and New Mexico.
"'Whiskey Tender' is a coming-of-age memoir," said Webster Creative Writing Director Murray Farish, who was one of Taffa's teachers at Webster. "But that's sort of like saying that Moby-Dick is about a whale. The book takes on the politics and pressures of assimilation, pushes back against the dismissal of indigenous American stories, and asks deep and abiding and troubling questions about this thing we call the American Dream."
Taffa, who directs the Creative Writing MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, will visit Webster this spring for the David Clewell Visiting Writers Series.
"We're thrilled to have Deborah join the Series," Farish said. "It's always great when we can bring former students back to meet our current students, when we can show them: look what Webster alums can do. We've just never had anyone from our program be a finalist for the National Book Award before, so obviously, that's pretty cool."
As part of her visit, Taffa will read from Whiskey Tender on Thursday, April 3, 2025 in the Browning Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public, and a book-signing will follow.
The winners of the National Book Awards will be announced in late November.
Earlier this year, Taffa earned a coveted NEA Fellowship, a prestigious grant that helps fund travel, research and other costs for new writers as they work on a book. Besides the NEA Fellowship and the National Book Foundation nomination, she received an Indigenous Visionary Women’s Leadership Award from the AICF (2023-2024), a Kranzberg Arts Fellowship (2022-2023), PEN America Jean Stein Grant (2022), a Tin House Fellowship (2022), and a Rona Jaffe/Hedgebrook Fellowship (2022). These awards came from her many essays, which can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, A Public Space, The Best of Brevity, Salon, The Huff Post, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading.