WWU’s Kathryn Trueblood wins literary award for her new essay, 'Blank Spaces, Black Frames'
WWU Associate Professor of English Kathryn Trueblood has won the 2025 Gabriele Rico Challenge for Nonfiction from Reed Magazine for her short essay, "Blank Spaces, Black Frames.”
The essay will be published in Reed Magazine’s 158th edition in May.
Excerpted from Trueblood’s memoir “The Big Ask,” “Blank Spaces, Black Frames” counts down the final days as her mother chooses how to complete her life. Her memoir is about her mother’s decision to voluntarily stop eating and drinking rather than enter assisted living during the COVID pandemic.
“My mother had no intention of joining a locked ward since she had spent a year in a mental hospital as a young woman,” said Trueblood. “Her decision to VSED (Voluntarily Stop Eating and Drinking) was complicated by her psychiatric history, including a suicide attempt earlier in her life.”
Kathryn Trueblood has been awarded the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction and the Red Hen Press Short Story Award. Her most recent book, “Take Daily As Needed,” (University of New Mexico Press, 2019) treats parenting while chronically ill with the dark humor the subject deserves. Her previous novel, “The Baby Lottery,” dealt with the repercussions of infertility in a female friend group, and was a Book Sense Pick in 2007. Her story collection, “The Sperm Donor’s Daughter,” takes a look at assisted reproduction and received a Special Mention for the distinguished Pushcart Prize in 2000.