Molloy Book Wins Southwest Book Award
Date: January 6, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Jeanette Smith, NMSU Library, (575) 646-7492, jcsmith@lib.nmsu.edu
The book El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin, co-edited by New Mexico State University librarian Molly Molloy and journalist Charles Bowden, has been selected to receive a Southwest Book Award, sponsored by the Border Regional Library Association (BRLA). Since 1971, the awards have been presented in recognition of outstanding books about the Southwest published each year in any genre.
Border Regional Library Association
The book is based on interviews with a hit man who kidnapped, tortured and murdered people for the Mexican drug industry for twenty years. El Sicario tells his story as a cautionary tale. Now a fugitive, he does not ask society to forgive him, but feels that he must do what he can do earn God’s forgiveness.
Bowden first encountered El Sicario while writing his book Murder City (Nation Books, 2010). As trust between the men developed, Bowden bore witness to El Sicario’s unfolding confession in an article in Harper’s Magazine, followed by an award-winning film, El Sicario Room 164 by Gianfranco Rosi, that premiered at the Venice Film Festival.
Molloy, the NMSU Library’s Latin American and Border Studies Librarian, translated the interviews and was instrumental in turning the transcripts into the book El Sicario (Nation Books, 2011). The book is available at the NMSU Library, Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com.
Molloy is known for her work with the online Frontera List at http://groups.google.com/group/frontera-list/topics. In the absence of an official count, she has taken on the task of keeping and reporting statistics obtained from newspaper reports on the daily and cumulative count of the murders in Mexico’s deadliest city, Ciudad Juárez.
Books eligible for the Southwest Book Awards must reflect and interpret the Southwest, defined as West Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and northern Mexico. They must appear in book or non-print format for the first time, and must be of high quality, both in the context of the current year’s entries and in the existing body of Southwestern literature. A scholarly work must make a well-documented contribution to scholarship in some aspect of Southwestern history or culture. Other nonfiction works should make reliable information accessible to the general reader. Poetry and fiction must reflect Southwestern culture and/or be set in the southwest.
A full list of 2011 Southwest Book Awards is available at http://brla.info/swba11.shtml. The awards will be presented at the Border Regional Library Association Awards Banquet on Saturday, February 25, in El Paso. The public is welcome. Banquet information and registration forms are available at http://brla.info/banquetreg.htm. Please make reservations by Monday, February 20.
For more information, contact Molloy at (575) 646-6931.
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