Sarton winner Valena Beety says she has been a writer since she was a kid, but she’s learned there’s a big difference between writing for oneself and writing for an audience. And an audience is what the lawyer/educator wanted for her story about wrongful convictions, especially in regard to women and the LGBTQ+ community.
“It’s the message about wrongful convictions that encouraged me to make that leap and write for an audience. This is the first book about how women and queer people are most likely to be wrongly convicted where no crime occurred. This includes my own clients, so it was also a way to share their stories,” says Valena about why she wrote Manifesting Justice.
In addition to the 2022 Sarton Nonfiction Award, Valena’s book won the Montaine Medal, which is awarded to books that provoke thought or progress. Manifesting Justice also earned an Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY).
Valena, a senior research scholar for the Academy for Justice, grew up in Indiana near Indianapolis. Her mom was a teacher in Indianapolis Public Schools, and her dad worked for General Motors. “We were a big GM family growing up, pretty common for Indiana. I didn’t live outside of the Midwest until I was twenty-seven, and now I’m back, teaching at Indiana University in Bloomington,” she says.
According to Valena, her experiences as a federal prosecutor in Washington D.C. and as an innocence litigator in Mississippi and West Virginia shaped her writing and her advocacy for those who are wrongly convicted. One thing the author learned in writing this book was how helpful it is to have someone to write with; she noted that this is something Story Circle Network makes possible for writers. “I had supportive writers on the same page, and a regular schedule of writing together.” That support group, she says, “truly helped me write through to the end of the book.
Asked what writing advice she would share with others, Valena mentioned John Grisham’s comment that writing his one nonfiction book was the hardest writing he had ever done and that he would never do it again. “For me, it’s nonfiction that comes easily. So I’d give the same advice you’ve heard before—write what you know.” Toward that goal, Valena is working on a second book, based on interviews with seventy innocence advocates and lessons learned from them. “The book will tell their stories, their clients’ stories, and hopefully help us keep moving forward to free innocent people from prison, as the innocence movement celebrates forty years since it began.”
Valena says receiving the Sarton Award is especially meaningful to her because it honors the lives of women and girls. “May Sarton incorporated her personal identity as a woman into her writing. I have tried to do the same in Manifesting Justice, at times discussing my own identity as a queer woman, and how that identity makes me and my wife vulnerable to being wrongly arrested and wrongly convicted.”
The author also notes that her book is timely, “particularly in light of legislation against transgender men and women, the rise in hate crimes against LGBTQ+ individuals, and even bomb threats at libraries and bookstores that host Drag Story Hour. Manifesting Justice calls out how queer people can be criminalized just for their identities. The Sarton Nonfiction Award recognizes we must support women, all kinds of women, and support each other, especially in the face of hate. I am incredibly honored to win the Sarton Award at this moment in time.”
