2018 has been one for the books for Three Rooms Press authors Gary Phillips, Hala Alyan, and George Wallace, who all netted major international literary awards for their fine work—on and off 3RP.

Gary Phillips, editor of 3RP title The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir, has been awarded the 2018 Anthony Award for Best Anthology, one of the most prestigious awards in crime fiction. The award was presented at the 2018 Bouchercon convention in St. Petersburg. Phillips, whose work also appears in the 3RP title Crime Plus Music, is the author of 18 novels, 9 comics, and 50 short stories.  In addition to the Anthony Award, The Obama Inheritance earned a Bronze Medal for the Foreword Reviews Indie Book Award for Anthologies, and was tapped by Newsweek as a Top 15 Recommended Read. The Washington Post raved, “Resistance takes many forms, particularly in the current political climate. Few methods of protest are as cheerfully strange and purposefully bizarre as The Obama Inheritance.”  The book is available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, your favorite indie bookstore, and directly from Three Rooms Press.

Hala Alyan, author of the 2013 3RP award-winning poetry collection Atrium (winner of the 2013 Arab-American Book Award for Poetry), has secured her place among the world’s elite authors in 2018 with her 2017 novel Salt Houses (Houghton-Mifflin). The awards list for this book is breathtaking, and includes:

• The 2018 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction, with the non-fiction Dayton award going to renowned essayist and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ We Were Eight Years in Power. The award honors authors whose works advance “peace as a solution to conflict”;
• 2018 Arab-American Book Award for Fiction;
• Finalist, Chatauqua Prize;
• “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, NYLON, and Kirkus Reviews.

The Three Rooms Press edition of Atrium is a powerful precursor to her later work, and is still available from Three Rooms Press and on Amazon. FYI: Hala’s forthcoming poetry collection, The Twenty-Ninth Year, is due out in January 2019 from Mariner Press.

George Wallace, poet and author of 3RP titles Poppin’ Johnny and EOS: Abductor of Men, has become the first American citizen to be awarded the Alexander the Great Gold Medal. The award, given by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), is presented to those who have made advancements with culture. It was inspired in part by his work on EOS, a bilingual (Greek-English) poetry collection, which has been hailed internationally as for its tender hopefulness. Greek poet Tryfon Tolides noted, “The poems in EOS are hopeful poems of what is possible, real, holy. The collection leaves me with a belief in the endlessness of people, their connection to the past—and to each other, and to all time.” EOS is available on Amazon and directly from Three Rooms Press.

We congratulate these three authors on their achievements, and look forward to seeing what else is in store for 2019.