Hawthorne Trivia: Kassten Alonso and Michael Strelow were both Oregon Book Award Finalists in 2005
Michael Strelow’s debut novel, The Greening of Ben Brown was an Oregon Book Award Finalist in Fiction 2005. So was Kassten Alonso’s debut novel Core: A Romance. Kass was Mike’s student while attending Willamette University. The winner that year was Marc Acito’s How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater.