Kionna Walker LeMalle, Lee Smith Novel Prize Winner 2023
Blair is proud to announce the winner of the Lee Smith Novel Prize is Behind the Waterline by Kionna Walker LeMalle. LeMalle's manuscript was selected by contest judge Deesha Philyaw (The Secret Lives of Church Ladies) from over five hundred novel submissions.
Of the winning manuscript, contest judge Deesha Philyaw says, “Behind the Waterline revisits two traumatic chapters in U.S. history, decades apart, but inextricably linked to the fate of one unforgettable young narrator. Catastrophes—natural, political, and familial—collide in this deeply moving, inventive, and surprising page-turner.”
When Hurricane Katrina approaches New Orleans, teenaged Eric and his grandmother and many of their neighbors decide to ride out the storm. Kionna Walker LeMalle’s masterful debut novel brings her readers, like the rising water, onto Eric’s street in the Third Ward, where stranded dogs bark for a time, where neighbors are floating on doors, and where Eric and his grandmother must take refuge in his second floor bedroom. After days of heat, dwindling supplies, and relentless rising water, neighbors begin to disappear and Eric’s grandmother, already known as an eccentric, begins to falter. It is then that Eric—in a dream, a hallucination, or something else—discovers a room beyond his closet wall, a place he has never seen. What he discovers inside will send him on a path to survival, bitter progress, and ultimately, to discovery of the history of his people—those he sorely misses and those he never even knew.
Kionna Walker LeMalle is an executive writer for the University of Houston-Downtown by day and a fiction and poetry writer by night. She has taught writers at every level, from elementary through graduate school, and remains on the faculty rosters for Houston’s Writers in the Schools and Houston Christian University. Committed to authentic writing community, LeMalle is the founder and lead administrator of the Writer.Teacher.Friend. critique group. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Education from Xavier University of Louisiana, a Master of Education degree from the University of New Orleans, and her MFA from Houston Christian University. She was born and raised in New Orleans, LA, and lives in Houston, TX. Both cities fuel her imagination and her belief in the restorative power of community, the church, and the second line. She and her husband Averri have four children and numerous pets who continue to support her obsession with writing.
Blair will publish the winning novel in Fall 2024.