David C Cook Novel Receives 2009 Christy Award

Jordan-Lake’s Blue Hole Back Home wins the First Novel category

Publisher David C Cook is pleased to announce that author Joy Jordan-Lake has received 2009 Christy Award for excellence in Christian Fiction. The award was presented on July 11, 2009 at the tenth annual Christy Awards presentation preceding this year’s International Christian Retailers Show in Denver, Colorado. Jordan-Lake’s Blue Hole Back Home took home honors in the First Novel category.

Every year, The Christy Award invites publishers to submit novels written from a Christian worldview and copyrighted in the year preceding the awards. Each novel is entered in one of several genre categories and/or the first novel category. The novels are then read and evaluated against a ten-point criteria by a panel of seven judges composed of librarians, reviewers, academicians, literary critics, and other qualified readers, none of whom have a direct affiliation with a publishing company. David C Cook received three nominations this year across two categories.

Blue Hole Back Home tells the story of the summer of 1979 when 15-year-old Turtle hung in a mangy pack with her brother, his friends, a couple of dogs, and the New Girl—the one with the deeply colored skin whose father prayed on a rug facing East. That was the summer hearts and minds—and lives—changed forever in a small Appalachian mountain town. The novel is a burning story of racial hatred, cowardice, faith and redemption. Jordan-Lake explores the innocence of a young friendship and the prejudice that will tear it apart.

Author Joy Jordan-Lake is also the author of Grit & Grace: Portraits of a Woman's Life (Harold Shaw); Whitewashing Uncle Tom's Cabin (Vanderbilt University Press); Working Families (WaterBrook Press), and Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous (Paraclete Press).

Founded in 1875, David C Cook is a leading nonprofit discipleship resource provider based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. For more than 130 years, David C Cook has served the Global Church with life transforming materials from best-selling books and curriculum, to toys and games and small group resources. With additional offices in Elgin, Illinois, as well as Paris, Ontario, Canada, and Eastbourne, UK, David C Cook is a global organization whose resources are published in more than 150 languages, distributed in more than 80 countries, and sold worldwide through retail stores, catalogs, and online. Through David C Cook’s music division, Kingsway, over 30% of the top 500 praise and worship songs are written by Kingsway artists and sung in churches around the world. For more information, visit David C Cook on the Internet at www.davidccook.com.