UW-Eau Claire creative writing professor BJ Hollars has always admired Ray Bradbury and has worked with the Farenheit 451 author. But now, Hollars will join the likes of Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut as a winner of the Society of Midland Authors’ Award for his nonfiction work, “Thirteen Loops: Race, Violence and the Last Lynching in America”. “We have a long history of really big winners in the past, so it’s humbling that I’m there at all,” Hollars said.  “What’s most exciting to me is I get to join people like Ray Bradbury who inspired me to begin with.” Hollars accepted the award on May 8 in Chicago during the annual awards dinner and ceremony. Each year, the Society has presented awards for excellence to authors and poets in adult fiction and nonfiction, biography, poetry, and children’s fiction and nonfiction published in the previous year. The competition is open to authors and poets who reside in, were born in, or have strong ties to the twelve-state Midwestern heartland. “It’s so unexpected, it came out of nowhere,” Hollars said.  “Being honored as a Midwesterner, that really means a lot to me, too.”