House of Good Hope: A Promise for a Broken City, by Michael Downs, winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. Forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press, March 2007. Downs is a journalism professor at the University of Montana and the recipient of a 2006 NEA Fellowship. You can read his short story, “At the Beach,” in the Summer 2006 issue of The Missouri Review, and you can read more about the book here.

The broken city of the title is Hartford, CT. Jennifer Reed interviewed Downs for the UM School of Journalism online newsletter:

“It’s about people from my hometown and the struggles they face in deciding to stay there or to leave,” Downs said.