Zipped is about 15-year-olld Mick Nichols, who's facing some of life's biggest challenges: his stepmother's apparent adultery, a crush on a girl of a different faith and a pathological boss. "How he overcomes these travails makes for a gripping story that reads like a murder mystery," said the judges. "Never trite or condescending, Zipped conjures characters that are as complex as they are original. Laura and Tom McNeal write with insight, flair and genuine empathy as they seamlessly navigate the bumpy terrain of the teenage psyche."

Laura McNeal, a former high school teacher, graduated from Brigham Young University and the Syracuse University fiction-writing program and has contrbuted to Threepenny Review, The Quarterly, and The Georgia Review, among others. Tom McNeal, who spent part of his childhood in Hay Springs, Nebraska, earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of California at Irvine and subsequently held a Stegner fellowship and a Jones Lectureship at Stanford. He wrote the award-winning novel Goodnight, Nebraska, his short story "Whatever Happened to Tully?" was made into the critically acclaimed independent film Tully, and his short stories have been widely published and anthologized. Together, the McNeals have collaborated on three young adult novels set in the fictional town of Jemison, New York, the third of which is forthcoming from Knopf next year. The first novel in the series, Crooked, won the California Book Award for Young Adult Literature and was named a Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association. They are also the authors of The Dog Who Lost His Bob, published by Albert Whitman. They live in northern San Diego County and are the parents of two boys, Sam and Hank.

To learn more about Tom McNeal, visit his web page at http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/ncw/mcneal.htm
And to learn more about Zipped, go here.

Nebraska Center for Writers