Professor’s coming-of-age novel nominated for literary award
Professor Deb Busman’s novel Like a Woman is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. The awards, in multiple categories, celebrate achievement in lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender writing published in 2015.
Busman is a fiction/creative non-fiction writer, co-director of CSUMB’s Creative Writing and Social Action program and an associate professor in the Division of Humanities and Communication.
Like a Woman</em
is a coming-of-age story, revealing the lives of teenage girls on the streets of Los Angeles, trying to hold onto their sense of humanity against a backdrop of racism, poverty, sexism and violence. In an interview with the Santa Cruz Sentinel last March, Busman said the project began as a memoir of her own growing up. “It’s easier to tell the truth using fiction, for me. I was more interested in capital-T Truths that I was in my own particular story,” she said. “And I wanted to explore some of the other characters in the story as well. “As a fiction writer, you get to tell everybody’s story.”
Several of the book’s chapters have been published in anthologies of short fiction. Busman told the Sentinel that her students encouraged her to get the book published. “As a professor of creative writing, I started to feel a little hypocritical that I wasn’t even doing what it took to put my own book out into the world.”
The Lambda award winners will be announced in June.
Published March 8, 2016