Joseph Boone, Gender Studies Professor in Media and Gender and professor of English and comparative literature, has won the 2023 Next Generation Indie Awards for First Novel (Over 90,000 Words) for Furnace Creek (Black Spring Press, 2023). The Next Generation Indie Awards is the world’s largest nonprofit awards program for independent publishers. Boone and other winners will be honored at a June 23 ceremony at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Furnace Creek also received an Eric Hoffer Award honorable mention in the general fiction category and was a finalist in Foreward’s Indie Book of the Year competition for LGBT+ fiction. (6/14/23)