Florencia Ramirez. Courtesy photo.
OXNARD — Two Oxnard writers received fellowships and an award from “A Room Of Her Own,” (AROHO) Foundation.
Florencia Ramirez received the Gift of Freedom $5,000 award for her creative non-fiction work. Mona AlvaradoFrazier received the Courage Fellowship Award. These awards permit them to attend the AROHO Retreat in New Mexico during August 2013.
The Creative Nonfiction Genre Finalist Florencia Ramirez’ creative project, Eat Less Water, is “…an environmental anthem for our time. Her writing is an estuary where the different rivers of her personality and experience converge. The salt water of her public policy training at the University of Chicago, the fresh water of her creative writing instruction, the brackish water of the activist, and the nurturing water of the educator and mother … spill onto the pages of her book project; a story that explores the connection between the looming problem of water scarcity and the food we eat.”
Ramirez’s articles have been published by Edible magazine and she was featured in Poets and Writers, the July/August issue. She loves speaking about food and water almost as much as writing about it and is available for speaking engagements.
Mona AlvaradoFrazier
AlvaradoFrazier Received the Courage Award, which provides for a fellowship to attend a week of workshops, master classes, and consults to develop the craft of writing with 85 other women writers from across the world. The retreat is held at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keefe’s summer home, in Abiqui, New Mexico.
Ramirez will continue to work on her project about water scarcity and AlvaradoFrazier will work on one of her two fiction manuscripts, a Young Adult and a Contemporary Fiction novel.
Both women are members of Women Who Write, a writers group that Ramirez helped initiate several years ago. For more on their writing projects you can visit their blogs: www.eatlesswater.com and www.alvaradofrazier.com