Gold Medal Book Award

North Bay Review

Press Release
Cape Giradeau, Mo., January 14, 2014
Southeast Missouri State University

“Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, Volume 1,” published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in cooperation with the Missouri Humanities Council and Warriors Arts Alliance, has won the 2013 Stars and Flags Book Award gold medal for an anthology.

A national contest, the Stars and Flags Book Awards program was established six years ago in order to promote books that have a connection to the military and to support veterans. The judges are historians, educators and authors, many of whom are veterans themselves.

The anthology includes poetry, short fiction, essays, and photography by military veterans and their families from across the nation, including writing about WWI, WWII, Viet Nam, the Gulf Conflict, Afghanistan and Iraq. The volume also sponsored a veterans’ writing competition with stellar judges Mark Bowden (“Black Hawk Down”), Brian Turner (“Here, Bullet”) and William Trent Pancoast (“Wildcat!”).

Bruce Sydow is a writer whose short stories and poems have appeared in Penduline, Proud to Be, Writing by American Warriors, Perfume River Poetry Review, Cooper Point, Salon, Switched-on Gutenberg, Blue Streak, Castabout Literature, and forthcoming in G.I. Days: An Anthology of Military Life.