2021 Memoir Contest winner

Minerva Rising Press is pleased to announce the winner of the 2021 Memoir Contest, Janice Airhart’s Mother of My Invention: A Motherless Daughter Memoir. 

In a Fifties household, while everyone else’s mothers are vacuuming in pearls and heels with a pot roast in the oven, Janice Airhart’s schizophrenic mother, fearful her husband is cheating on her and poisoning the kids, treats her children with bleach laced lemonade. As Airhart searches for who her mother really was, she discovers who she became as her mother’s shame-inducing illness progressed.

The winner was selected by Tara Neilson, author of Raised in Ruins, a memoir about growing up in the ruins of a remote Alaskan cannery. Tara said of judging the contest, “I think judging this memoir kept me sane during this unusually harsh winter, reading personal experiences that immersed me in a life different from my own.”

Janice Airhart has a B.S. in Biology and M.A. in Journalism and has been employed as a medical technologist, biomedical research tech, freelance writer and editor, science teacher, college science program representative, and adjunct English professor. She edited publications for The University of Tulsa from 2000 to 2005 and co-authored the book Human Spirit: Holy Spirit (2003). Writing credits include articles in Lutheran Woman Today and The Science Teacher, among others. Essays created from excerpts of her memoir have appeared in The Sun, Tulsa Review, Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write 2019 and 2021 anthologies and One Woman’s Day blog. Her essay, “Migration” has been accepted for publication in the spring edition of the Concho River Review.

Janice lives in Leander, Texas with her husband Tim, their dog Bella, and a recent addition, Ollie the cat. She is currently at work on a collection of essays about her eight years teaching science and English to pregnant and parenting teen girls in Oklahoma.

The winner will receive a monetary award and ten copies. Publication is scheduled for fall 2022.