Tech Professor Wins Award For First Book

Tennessee Tech Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature Monic Ductan honored with Humanities Tennessee’s inaugural Tennessee Book Award.

Ductan’s first book “Daughters of Muscadine” won the award in the fiction category. The book consists of a collection of short stories about a black family based in a made-up town called Muscadine, named after Muscadine grapes. Ductan said she believes she won the award because of how the story resonates.

“I’ve had the privilege of talking to a lot of different readers,” Ductan said. “It’s nine short stories they are all kind of about regular people. They are about people’s family struggles, they are about poverty so maybe there is something in them that is relatable to a certain reading demographic.”

Ductan has received additional recognition for her book including the Weatherford Award from Berea College in Kentucky and is on the Georgia Center for the Book’s list of “Books All Georgians Should Read”. Ductan said she is appreciative of the recognition she has received for her first book.

“I think that’s the dream and what we all want as an author,” Ductan said. “To be recognized for our work, to have a good reading base, and to be acknowledged for it. I’m just really lucky to be able to have this accomplished with my first book.”

Ductan said it was a lengthy process to write and publish her first book.

“I started writing it in graduate school about ten or twelve years ago,” Ductan said. “So I wrote half the stories as a graduate student down in Georgia and Mississippi and then the other half I wrote since I became a professor here.”

Ductan said throughout the whole process she never expected to receive the recognition she has received. Ductan said she is currently working on a few essays and a novel and expects to publish them within the next couple of years to further her writing career.