name: Olympia Vernon
avg_rating: 3.69
ratings_count: 910
about: Olympia Vernon grew up in a small town on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana, the fourth of seven children. She has a degree in criminal justice and received her MFA from Louisiana State University in the spring of 2002. Olympia has twice been granted the Matt Clark Memorial Scholarship and was nominated for the Robert O. Butler Award in Fiction in 2000. She is the author of A Killing in this Town, Logic and Eden, for which she won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award in 2004. In 2005 she won the Governor’s Arts Award in the Professional Artist category in Louisiana. In 2008 A Killing in This Town won the first annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence award.