The Third Annual Jenfolk Book Awards

In which I bestow book awards on behalf of all Jenkind.

This past year, I’ve been extremely judgy. In February and March, I participated in the judging committee for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize for best first book. Then in the summer, I served as a screener judge for the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The University of Georgia Press will publish the winning collection, A Desert Between Two Seas by A. Muia, next year. I’ve also been reading and selecting books for the Southwest Books of the Year. Our picks will be announced in January and featured at the Tucson Festival of the Book in March.

All this judgery serves as training to enable me to carry out my most important ceremonial duty here at the Tumbleweed: bestowing the annual Jenfolk Book Awards on behalf of Jenkind. There are over 1.5 million Jens, Jennys, and Jennifers in America. So far, no Jen has come forward to challenge me for the right to unilaterally select and award these prizes, based on the fifty or so books I managed to read this year. So I’m going to keep it up until another Jen, Jenny, or Jennifer tackles me and demands that I stop. Until then, I speak for Jennifers Lawrence, Garner, Coolidge, Lopez, Hudson, and all the rest in awarding these honors. I loved reading these books, and I hope they delight you too!

Best Novel for Making Jens Laugh Out Loud

Colored Television (2024) by Danzy Senna

I startled myself by laughing out loud several times while I read Colored Television—even when a book is funny I tend to chortle internally. But Senna’s jokes, including one that involved Papa Smurf, were hilarious enough to make me expel that chortle free, into the air. It could be that I identified a little too much with this story of a novelist who labors for ten years on her second book, only to have it roundly rejected as a pretentious mess by her agent and publisher. Jane, with her artist husband and two kids, can’t afford to buy a house in the Los Angeles area where she teaches, bounces around to rental properties, and finally seeks a payday in Hollywood. Hollywood is a fickle mistress, which we knew already, but the journey is all the fun in this smart, witty, fantastic novel.

Favorite Book Involving Ghosts, Bigfoot, and Aliens

The Paranomal Ranger: A Navajo Investigator's Search for the Unexplained by Stanley Milford Jr.

You knew this book was a shoo-in in this category because it involves spirits AND cryptids AND extraterrestrial life. What bounty! After growing up between his Diné father’s community in Arizona and his Cherokee mother’s home in Oklahoma, Stanley Milford Jr., went into law enforcement out of “a deep desire to help people and serve his community.” Milford began his career in Monument Valley as a Navajo Ranger, and soon was tapped to investigate cases “of high strangeness.” Milford is an engaging storyteller, capturing the landscape, people, and vast scope of his job in rich detail. Over two decades with the Rangers, he investigated sightings of aliens, bigfoot, skin walkers, ghosts and more. People who witnessed these mysteries felt belittled by regular police, so Milford treated them with respect, truly listened to them, and investigated their claims earnestly. Milford intersperses stories of Ranger adventures with tales from Diné creation myths, which meaningfully echo the unexplained phenomenon in this entertaining, atmospheric, and unexpectedly moving book.

Jenkind’s Short Story Collection of the Year

Mystery Lights (2024) by Lena Valencia

Lena Valencia’s debut revels in haunting desert landscapes, offering spooky surprises alongside insightful, offbeat takes on the dangers of contemporary womanhood. In “Dogs,” a Hollywood writer’s disturbing encounter on a Mojave retreat causes her to rethink telling her daughter to “toughen up.” In the title story, a publicist plans a promotional event in Marfa, Texas with its “desert-minimalist-chic trend that was catnip to the Instagram waifs with their peasant dresses and Manson girl hair,” attracting the crazed followers of an online influencer. In “The White Place,” the young lover of a Georgia O’Keefe-like painter has a fling with a teenager, but the painter exerts ultimate control. In “The Reclamation,” a Coachella Valley retreat for women business leaders hosted by a kooky lifestyle brand maven descends into chaos as the women succumb to primal instincts. Each story is authentic, startling, and enhanced by southwestern ambiance.

Best Novel that Caught Jennys by Surprise

All Fours (2024) by Miranda July

This novel took me on a funny, insightful, unexpected journey from the very beginning when its protagonist set out on a road trip…and then only drove a few miles. I wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “Girls who grew up in the '80s passing around Judy Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, now midlife women, should share All Fours for its attention to many of the same questions: What's going to happen to me? What should I do about it? What does it all mean? The responses July's narrator uncovers, so particular and unexpected, should propel readers forward to discover their own answers.”

An Expansive, Classically Good Novel for Jens To Wallow Around In

The Entire Sky (2024) by Joe Wilkins

Are you looking for a sturdy, lyrical novel that you can linger in for a while, full of beauty and heart and nature and characters that you’ll care about? Then check out Joe Wilkins’ accomplished novel. I wrote for High Country News: “The Entire Sky is structured in an expansive, deft, three-perspective braid, bringing the viewpoints of Rene, a widowed rancher, his daughter Lianne, and a runaway 16-year-old named Justin into chorus. The story opens in April 1994, just as the world learns of the death of Kurt Cobain, the singer a skinny, blonde, sixteen-year-old named Justin resembles and idolizes. Months earlier, Justin was sent from the Seattle area by his addict mother to live with his raging uncle Heck, who isolates and abuses him. Justin finally frees himself through a courageous act that ensures the police will come after him. Carrying his beloved guitar, Justin hikes, hitchhikes and stows away until he ends up on Rene Bouchard’s ranch.”

Best Memoir by A Non-Jennifer Who is Now an Honorary Jennifer

Whiskey Tender (2024) by Deborah Jackson Taffa

This is the memoir I’m recommending to my students right now. It’s a classic coming-of-age story, told with beauty and tenderness. Born on the California Yuma reservation, Jackson Taffa grows up in Navajo land, when her Quechan father seeks employment and a better life for his family in New Mexico. Jackson Taffa’s mother is Mexican American, and she resists helping Deborah learn about her Native heritage, in part because there are so many painful aspects to her family’s story. Beautifully told, full of striking images and keen emotion, this book will stay with me for a while.

Jen’s Best Classics of the Year

Black Boy (1945) by Richard Wright

Richard Wright’s memoir of his boyhood and young adulthood tells the improbable story of the origins of one of the best novelists America has ever produced. Wright grew up in abject poverty in the Jim Crow South, spending most of his childhood malnourished, his schooling continually disrupted, with everyone convinced he’d amount to nothing. Somehow his drive to read and write overcame all of this. There’s a beautiful moment when he is in his early twenties and he convinces a white coworker to let him check out books using his library card. As he reads, a whole world of ideas opens to him:

“I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.”

Wright’s writing is gorgeous, sensitive, and intelligent, and this might be my favorite memoir about a writer’s origin I’ve ever read.

Parable of the Sower (1993) by Octavia Butler

I had never read Octavia Butler’s most famous book before, and I picked it up in part because this dystopian novel begins in the year 2024. Butler’s convincing, terrifying vision of an America ravaged by climate change, violence, and economic inequality is harrowing, but what stays with me is its hopefulness. Lauren Olamina, the steady, wise, and brave young narrator has constructed her own belief system. She asserts that “God is change,” with change being the only lasting and constant quality of life. But she believes that individuals can shape the change, and she enacts this belief by forging a community of refugees that protects each other and keeps the best qualities of humanity alive for one another as they travel north to escape the ravages of Souther California. It was exactly the book I needed to read right now, as all of us face the uncertain future, knowing that the one thing we can count on is change. As Lauren reminds us, let’s shape that change, shall we?

If you like to read paperbacks, check out my Jenfolk Book Awards from 2023 and 2022.

The Happenings & Links Portion of The Tumbleweed

• My next four-week Lighthouse class is for nonfiction aficionados: Personal Essays: From the Particular to the Universal. It runs on Mondays from February 3 to February 24 on Zoom, from 6:30-8:30 p.m. If you have ideas for personal essays you want to write, but don’t know how to structure them, get started, or craft them so your personal story will grip readers who don’t know you, this is the class for you!

• I had a blast discussing A.G. Mojtabai's new book Featherless with Greg Wolfe of Slant Books. Mojtabai is 87 and this is her 12th book. It's a thoughtful, funny novella about life in an assisted living facility, and she wasn’t able to promote its release, so Greg and I threw it a little celebration on his Slantcast program. (I read a wonderful passage 11 minutes into this Youtube video if you want a preview of the book!)

• I used to teach an occasional class through Lighthouse about how writers can build their presence on the internet, and I paused it because I had no idea. But I do recommend Bluesky for people who love books, art, movies, science and more. It has robust anti-troll functions, and it is the only current social platform that doesn’t punish posts that have links in it, so you can share links to your work. Join me there at @jennyshank.bsky.social.

• I’m going to be on a panel at the upcoming AWP conference in Los Angeles on Friday, March 28 called “Making the Cut: What Judging Story Collection Contests Taught Us.” Led by Flannery O’Connor Prize editor Lori Ostlund, I’ll be talking about what made story collections stand out to me, alongside my fellow screener judges Toni Ann Johnson, Michael Wang and Hasanthika Sirisena.

As always, The Tumbleweed welcomes your questions and comments about writing, reading, taco eating, the Denver Nuggets, rabbit wrangling, Deion Sanders, Ralphie the Bison, and baby seals.