Darryl Wimberley’s Paul Bunyan and A Seeping Wound are twin Finalists in the 2016 Goethe Awards for Historical Fiction.”

The Goethe Novel Writing Competition recognizes emerging new talent and outstanding works in the genre of post-1750s Historical Fiction. The Goethe Awards is a division of Chanticleer International Novel Writing Competitions.

Dateline: February 2nd, 2017  News from our Publisher:

Read it Here!

HISTORICAL FICTION Post-1750s – 2016 GOETHE Awards SHORT LIST

A Seeping Wound – RELEASE DATE –  Jun 15, 2016

In his arresting novel, A Seeping Wound, Darryl Wimberley forcefully chronicles life in one of the many slave camps of the rural American South in the early twentieth century—a place of persistent violence and evil, though it also hosts moments of human kindness. Martha Longfoot is the story’s narrator, a half Muskogee Indian raised in the camp. She is also the camp’s medicine woman, a hard-won status that keeps her safe from the sexual violence that pervades the place. Martha comes across as a character with dimension who is worthy of respect. Her robust narrative, enhanced by her powerful vocabulary and occasional biblical references, is compelling, if it sometimes strains credulity. She begins the book angry and distrustful of white people, and ends the tale by saving white folks who are unjustly enslaved. Martha brings some closure to the experience by asking “Why does one wound heal while another festers?”

Other characters in  A Seeping Wound are less complex, including the ruthless Captain Riggs, who runs the turpentine camp. This man, and the thugs working for him, are predictably violent, uncaring, cruel, and unchanging. Veteran Prescott Hampton, though, shines, and he is set up in the narrative as a contrast to Martha, as a camp outsider. He comes from New York searching for his sister and brother-in-law, who are enslaved in the turpentine camp. Where Martha is poor, uneducated, and surprisingly literate, Hampton is educated and comes from a financially comfortable family headed by his father, a journalist. But, Hampton and Martha are commonly flawed—each suffers from a seeping wound that must be healed. Wimberley adroitly uses this wound image as both a cause of pain and a source of productivity, whether in a pine tree being tapped for sap or a human gashed by the vicissitudes of life.

Historically accurate,  A Seeping Wound  is a dark story of human cruelty, and an ode to the preeminence of the human spirit.  –   JOHN SENGER

DARRYL WIMBERLEY has been recognized for both novels noir and literary work. A Tinker’s Damn won the ForeWord Award for “Best Literary Novel” in 2001. The King of Colored Town was the first novel to garner the Willie Morris Award for Fiction in 2007. Darryl writes, works, and lives with his family in Austin.

Darryl has five critically acclaimed novels with St. Martin’s/Minotaur; these are novels noir set along the Big Bend of Florida’s Gulf Coast whose narratives feature Special Agent Barrett Raines, Florida Department of Law Enforcement. See A Rock and a Hard Place (1999), Dead Man’s Bay (2000), Strawman’s Hammock (2001) Pepperfish Keys (2007), and “Devil’s Slew” (2011). A separate novel, Kaleidoscope, was published by The Toby Press, 2008; the novel is based on a script that was the Grand Prize Winner of Fade In: Magazine’s 1998 competition.

Aside from these works, Wimberley has authored two works of literary fiction, both of which have won national awards. A Tinker’s Damn, was published in 2000 by MacMurray and Beck and won a ForeWord Magazine Award for Best Literary Novel. The King of Colored Town, was published in 2007 by The Toby Press. That novel won the first Willie Morris Award for Fiction in 2008.