Professor Calla Jacobson was recently awarded the Sandra Carpenter Prize for Creative Nonfiction, which is an annual award given by the Sandra Carpenter Memorial Fund, in partnership with the First Pages Prize.

Jacobson won the award based on an excerpt from her working manuscript, “The Tiger’s Paw Print: A Memoir of Myth and Desire in the Himalayas.” She was awarded $750, a developmental edit, and an agent consultation.

“For more than two decades, people have been telling me that I should write the story of my daughter’s origin — conceived, as she was, in an unlikely love that blossomed with a subsistence farmer in the Himalayas,” Jacobson says. “I have finally done so, in a memoir that is part immersion into the daily life of a mountain community, part love story, and part retelling of a local mythology featuring sorrowful birds, stingy gods, a feral female yeti, and the ordinary humans implicated in their exploits.”

“We’ve been really pleased to offer this international writing prize as a way to support an American writer, identifying as a woman, in the development and publication of her creative nonfiction manuscript,” Kezia Carpenter, an advisor to the SCMF, said in a statement. “We hope the prize can further facilitate Calla’s participation in the global writing community and promote new opportunities for her to engage in international travel and/or living that can support her and her work.”

First Pages Prize is an international competition that supports emerging, un-agented writers. The Sandra Carpenter Memorial Fund was created in honor of Sandra Carpenter, who was a writer and a board member of First Pages Prize.

Jacobson taught at CC from 2000-2004 as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology, and has returned since then as a block visitor.

You can read more about Jacobson’s work and memoir on her website.