2018 LaSalle Storyteller Award in Fiction Awarded to Juan Carlos Reyes

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December 3, 2018 – Artist Trust is proud to announce author Juan Carlos Reyes as the award recipient of the 2018 LaSalle Storyteller Award in Fiction, an unrestricted grant of $10,000 recognizing a Washington State fiction writer.

Juan Carlos Reyes was born in Guayaquil, Ecuador and immigrated to the United States in 1983. He grew up in West New York, NJ, a small congested city across the Hudson River from Manhattan Island. He is the author of the novella A Summer’s Lynching (winner of Quarterly West’s 2016 novella prize) and the fiction chapbook Elements of a Bystander (winner of Arcadia Press’s 2017 fiction chapbook prize). His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in KGB Lit, Hawai’i Review, and Florida Review, among others. He is a 2018 Jack Straw Writers Fellow and is currently an Assistant Professor of creative writing at Seattle University. He is the chief editor of Big Fiction magazine.

“I’m honored to receive the LaSalle Storyteller Award,” says Reyes. “I’ll never forget Gar’s phone call, feeling the world open up for my work. This award comes at a wonderful creative junction as I’ll use it for a residency to complete my novel-in-progress. My sincerest gratitude to Gar LaSalle for his generosity and support and to Artist Trust working tirelessly for artists in Washington State.”

Created in 2015, the LaSalle Storyteller Award in Fiction honors exceptional fiction writers based in Washington State. “Great story tellers are, in the best sense of the terms, seducers and precious gift-givers who help us understand who we are,” says Gar LaSalle, the funder of the award. Past recipients of the LaSalle Storyteller Award in Fiction are Anca L.Szilágyi (2015), Peter Mountford (2016), and E. Lily Yu (2017).

Now in its fourth year, Gar LaSalle has recently endowed the LaSalle Storyteller Award with a legacy gift, ensuring this important support for storytellers continues for generations to come. Artist Trust is honored to be the recipient of this generous donation, one of the largest endowment gifts pledged to the organization in its history.

2018 LaSalle Storyteller Award Selection Panelists
Annie Liu Kellor,writer, King County
Matthew Young, writer, Thurston County
E. Lily Yu, writer, King County

About Gar LaSalle
A physician, sculptor, award-winning filmmaker and author, Gar LaSalle has been honored widely in both the medical and fine arts communities for his leadership and creativity. He has earned acclaim for his historical fiction novels, including Widow Walk, and its sequels, Isthmus and The Fairness of Beasts. His first feature-length film, Diary of a Moonlighter, the first-ever documentary about the new specialty of Emergency Medicine, was produced in 1976 and aired on the PBS series P.O.V. LaSalle writes from his home in Seattle and sculpts in his studio on Maury Island.

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