Red Room Where the Writers Are

Summertime and the winning is easy!

Well, maybe not so easy. The competition in Red Room's two contests was extremely fierce, and winners weren't known until the very last minute. Both contests ended Thursday, July 31st, and Red Room congratulates the winners:

Summer Book Giveaway. The challenge was to write an account of a memorable summer reading experience. Each of the five winners will receive fourteen bestselling books, provided by Hachette Book Group, USA.

Susan Browne writes about experiencing Rilke's classic Letters to a Young Poet as a young woman just finding herself in her essay Living The Questions.

In The Ruined Summer of Reading, Gideon Weitzman describes finding time between teaching and raising kids to connect with his roots in Stephen Dubner's Turbulent Souls.

The World According to Garp by John Irving captivated a sixteen-year-old on her first trip to France. Twenty-five years later, Lisa Ahlstedt reminisces in My Most Memorable Summer Read.

Jennifer Gibbons places us in the early ‘80s when the Go-Go's ruled, everyone spoke like a Valley Girl, and she was obsessed with Nancy Drew. It All Started With Nancy Drew.

A summer in the ‘70s spent in working on a boat off the coast of Yugoslavia was the backdrop as Ben Campbell discovers the very American Centennial by James Michener in his essay Refusal Was Not An Option.

Housewarming Party. Red Room is your online home, and what better way to celebrate a new home than to throw a housewarming party? Authors and members competed to see how many visitors they could attract to their Red Room pages during June and July 2008, and the three authors and three members who received the most visits won. Ingenious homemade videos, Facebook campaigns, email blasts...our community did it all. The secret to our winners' success, though, was creating and sharing contributions of consistently high quality, especially blog essays, but also photos and other types of content.

Grand Prize: University of California, Berkeley, writing and public-speaking instructor Ericka Lutz (left; author of seven nonfiction books including On the Go with Baby and The Complete Idiot's Guide to Stepparenting) and aspiring young-adult novelist Jennifer Gibbons (right) win a spectacular evening of luxury in San Francisco. They will start with a fabulous multi-course dinner at restaurant Michael Mina(winner of two Michelin stars) with two superstar Red Room authors: San Francisco Chronicle Executive Vice President and Editor-at-Large Phil Bronstein, who was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Philippines in the 1980s; and Terry McMillan, author of several #1 New York Times-bestselling novels, two of which (Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back) were made into hit Hollywood movies. Red Room founder and CEO Ivory Madison (author of the just-released Huntress: Year One six-part miniseries from DC Comics) will join the festivities as well. The grand prize also includes a one-night stay provided by the luxurious Westin St. Francishotel.

By the way, Jennifer's writing talent and skill at attracting visitors have led us to make a new rule for future concurrent contests to allow only one winner at a time.

(Note: Earlier, we reported erroneously that another member was one of the winners of the Grand Prize. We're very sorry for the mistake.)

Second Prize: Writing and literature instructor and novelist Jessica Barksdale Inclán (left; author of Being With Him, Believe In Me, and more) and journalist, screenwriter, and playwright Lynn Liccardo (right) win $250.00 worth of books by Red Room authors purchased from legendary independent bookseller and literary community advocate Book Passage,via an upcoming link on redroom.com, and the right to have two each of their favorite supported causes featured on Red Room's homepage during the month to come.

Third Prize: Ellen R. Sheeley (author of Reclaiming Honor in Jordan: A National Public Opinion Survey on "Honor" Killings) and prolific Red Room member Dennis Shay win literary kitchen accessories from Kitchen Sink Dramas,including a bistro apron with Oscar Wilde's quote, "After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one's own relations," and a set of six tea towels featuring excerpts from stories by Kate Chopin, O Henry, D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde, and Saki. Approximate value of US$200.00

Congratulations again to all the winners, and a big thank you to everyone on Red Room who participated. We appreciate the wonderful content you create and share here, and the attention you bring to our new online community both elsewhere on the Web and in "the real world." Red Room's success is a direct result of your participation, and we are truly grateful.

-Your friends at Red Room