State of Grace by Sandra Moran was Awarded the Gold Medal in the Midwest Region at the 21st Annual IPPY Awards Ceremony 

On Tuesday, May 30th, the Copacabana in New York City played host to the 21st Annual Independent Publisher’s Awards Ceremony. The event was attended by Cheri Moran and Tom Myers, Sandra Moran’s mother and stepfather, who accepted the medal in her honor. “You can never know how much it meant to me,” said Moran. “I cried of course, and Tom teared up too.”


Birdie Holloway is a typical eleven-year-old growing up in a small, corn-fed Kansas town in the early 1980s—that is until her best friend, Grace, is brutally murdered. Suddenly, everything changes for Birdie, and everything she believes she knows about her insulated small-town life is called into question. Obsessed in figuring out who killed her friend, Birdie spends years trying to find the murderer. Eventually, she connects with someone who is every bit as interested in the case as she is.

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Someone who knows how close she is to solving the murder.

Someone who will kill again to keep her quiet . . .


SANDRA MORAN was an author and assistant adjunct professor of anthropology at Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas. A native Kansan, she worked professionally as a newspaper journalist, a political speechwriter, and an archaeological tour manager. In her novels, she strived to create flawed characters struggling to find themselves within the cultural constructs of gender, religion and sexuality. Moran authored the critically acclaimed novels Letters Never Sent, Nudge, The Addendum, and All We Lack. Revisions on State of Grace, her final novel, were completed in September 2015. Less than a month later, she was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. She passed away on November 7, 2015.

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