English professor wins multiple screenwriting awards
September 4, 2013
George Guthridge, English professor at the Bristol Bay Campus, and his coauthor, Deborah
Schidt, a casting director from Anchorage, have won several major screenwriting awards
this year.
In July, The Kids from Nowhere, based on George's book by that name, won the Las Vegas International Screenplay Competition.
In August it earned second place in the Kay Snow Contest (a Northwest regional contest)
and was one of several finalist screenplays selected for a public reading by professional
actors at the Portland Film Festival. In September it won the Moondance Film Festival
Competition, which promotes screenplays about indigenous peoples. The screenplay also
was the Grand Prize Winner in the New Hampshire International Screenplay Competition.
The screenplay is about George's students from the Siberian-Yupik village of Gambell
on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. In the 1980s they stunned American education
by winning three national championships in academics.
George has taught at UAF for 24 years and has also won several major awards as a novelist
and short story writer. This was his first attempt at a screenplay.