2024 Award Recipients - Debbie Weingarten

BLUFF, UT –  The Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers has chosen Debbie Weingarten of Brevard, North Carolina, as the recipient of the eighteenth annual Desert Writers Award. A grant of $5,000 will support work on her book proposal, provisionally titled “Quitting Season.”

Debbie Weingarten, an Ohio native, lived in the southern Arizona desert for nearly two decades, when she worked as an activist for an organization offering legal and humanitarian aid to migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.  She later took employment on an Arizona vegetable farm where she met her future husband.  The two of them partnered with two friends to purchase seventy-five acres of irrigated land and started a family.  “Quitting Season,” a memoir-in-essays, grows from her desert farm experience, which grew increasingly difficult and dangerous over time. 

“I was pregnant with our second child when my then-husband’s emotional and verbal abuse became physical,” she wrote. “When I finally gathered the courage to leave my marriage and my farm, it was like stepping outside of a years-long dust storm into crystalline clarity.  The desert – in her misunderstood, exploited beauty, in her unwavering ferocity – became my friend, my sister, my teacher. She taught me how to survive.”

“Quitting Season” chronicles Ms. Weingarten’s experiences of violence visted on herself as a young mother and on the land and people, too, in a place she had grown to love.  She writes of her narrative-in-progress, “Haunted by endangered species and depleting aquifers, I farm vegetables amidst dust devils and chronicle the migrants slipping through my Sonoran Desert backyard in hopes of a better life, and ultimately I leave my own terrifying marriage.” 

Grand Central Publishing, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group, will publish “Quitting Season” in 2025.

Ms. Weingarten’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Guernica, and The New York Review of Books, among other publications, including the 2016 and 2017 Best of Food Writing anthologies. She was also a finalist for the Salute of Excellence Award, given by the National Association of Black Journalists for exemplary coverage of African American people and issues. 

In her application to the Ellen Meloy Fund, Ms. Weingarten wrote, “As a former farmer, much of my writing examines the intersection of agriculture and social justices. Central in most of my stories are the relationships between people and the land. I believe that this intimate relationship between a person and a place is the root of Ellen Meloy’s work – her ‘deep map of place’ – and it is why her writing compels me so.” 

Upon receiving the news that she had won the Ellen Meloy Award, Ms. Weingarten responded, "When I read Ellen's writing, it's like finding a sister on the page. Though I was never lucky enough to meet her, I feel such deep gratitude and respect for Ellen's work and for her fierce love of the desert. I am so honored—besotted, really—to be receiving an award in her name, alongside so many of my favorite desert writers. Thank you to the moon and back for your support and encouragement."

In addition to the award winner, the Meloy board named two 2024 Runners-Up: Miles Griffis of Los Angeles, California, for a project titled “Yucca Man”; and Ceal Klingler of Bishop, California, for “How We Live with Each Other.”