Writer Rebecca Skloot made it big — very big — with her nonfictional The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, a best-seller since it appeared in 2010. At the time of the book’s publication, Skloot was teaching in the University of Memphis’ creative writing department.
More good news this summer for the department: the announcement in early July that Courtney Miller Santo‘s first novel had been sold to William Morrow in a six-figure, two-book deal by Santo’s agent, Alexandra Machinist.
That debut novel, which was Santo’s thesis project for her MFA at the U of M (a degree she earned in May), concerns a cross-generational family of strong female characters. It’s also a novel that made it to the list of 50 semifinalists in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest in general fiction, the winner of which receives a cash prize of $15,000 and publication of the manuscript by Penguin books. It was Santo’s contest submission that first attracted the attention of her agent.
