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When your mission is to Discover Today’s Best Books, you can’t help but crow about it when good news comes for your authors!

Gold and Blue Badge for the Nellie Bly Awards Grand Prize Winner Nicole Evelina's book The Forgotten Suffragists

Nicole Evelina’s book America’s Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor took home the Grand Prize for Longform Journalistic Non-Fiction, and that book is now available to be shared widely with the world at large!

A USA Today Bestselling author, this is Evelina’s first ever biography, and we know it’s going to be huge!

America's Forgotten Suffragists, out 3/1/23

After being forgotten for nearly 130 years, the “Mother of Suffrage in Missouri” and her husband are finally taking their rightful place in history.

St. Louisans Virginia and Francis Minor forever changed the direction of women’s rights by taking the issue to the Supreme Court for the first and only time in 1875, a feat never eclipsed even by their better-known peers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

 

Yet despite a myriad of accomplishments and gaining notoriety in their own time, the Minors’ names have largely faded from memory. In 1867, Virginia founded the nation’s first organization solely dedicated to women’s suffrage—two years before Anthony formed the National Woman’s Suffrage Association (NWSA). Virginia and Francis were also the brains behind the groundbreaking idea that women were given the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, a philosophy the NWSA adopted for nearly a decade.

And their story doesn’t end there. After the court case, Francis went on to become a prolific writer on women’s rights and one of the first and strongest male allies of the suffrage movement. Virginia instigated tax revolts across the country and campaigned side-by-side with Anthony for women’s rights in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska.

America’s Forgotten Suffragists: Virginia and Francis Minor is the first biography of these suffrage celebrities who were unique for their time in being jointly dedicated to the cause of female enfranchisement. This book follows their lives from slave-holding Virginians through their highly-lauded civilian work during the Civil War, and into the height of the early suffrage movement to show how two ordinary people of like mind, dedicated to a cause, can change the course of history.

Nicole Evelina is…

A USA Today bestselling author from St. Louis. Her specialties are historical fiction, non-fiction (biography, history and pop culture), and women’s fiction, with some poetry thrown in. Her books have won more than 50 awards, including four Book of the Year designations.

She’s represented by Amy Collins of Talcott-Notch Literary Services. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Independent Journal, Curve Magazine and numerous historical publications.

When not writing, you can find her reading, playing with her spoiled twin Burmese cats or at her day job as an internal communications (PR) manager. But that just pays the bills. To her core, she is a writer.

America’s Forgotten Suffragists is available now wherever books are sold! Village Books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon.

Got your own Journalistic Non-Fiction? Submit to the Nellie Bly Awards today! See our full list of Book Award Programs here.