2019 Iowa Review Awards
Non-Fiction Runner-up
Runner-up: Andes Hruby, “The Kitty”
Roxanne Gay says, “In ‘The Kitty,’ a daughter offers a moving, finely detailed portrait of an imperfect mother, a life lived precariously because of an imperfect mother’s choices, a border crossing, an exchange, a hunger for small comforts, however fleeting they might be.”
Andes Hruby was at Bennington College when she started as a reporter for Fortune Magazine during the Gulf War. After graduating, she went on to write copy for Armani, Calvin Klein, Claude Montana, Ungaro, and Valentino. Hruby felt at home in the fashion world due to her decade-long career as a Ford Model. She completed her Columbia University MFA and published mainstream fiction with the Dutton, Penguin & Putnam group. Motherhood introduced her to the world of Scholastic Publishing where she became a ghostwriter. Hruby has been a nonfiction contributor at Allure, Bend Living, Cosmopolitan, Concierge Q, Elle, Garden & Design, Glamour, Marie Claire, Wanderlust Media, and 1859 (Oregon’s Magazine). “The Kitty” is the first chapter of her memoir, another of which was featured in the Los Angeles Times article “The Robert Mapplethorpe photo you haven’t seen: The one he took of me.”