English professor wins multiple screenwriting awards

September 4, 2013

Cornerstone

George Guthridge, English professor at the Bristol Bay Campus, and his coauthor, Deborah Schidt, a casting director from Anchorage, have won several major screenwriting awards this year.

In July, The Kids from Nowhere, based on George's book by that name, won the Las Vegas International Screenplay Competition. In August it earned second place in the Kay Snow Contest (a Northwest regional contest) and was one of several finalist screenplays selected for a public reading by professional actors at the Portland Film Festival. In September it won the Moondance Film Festival Competition, which promotes screenplays about indigenous peoples. The screenplay also was the Grand Prize Winner in the New Hampshire International Screenplay Competition.

The screenplay is about George's students from the Siberian-Yupik village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea.  In the 1980s they stunned American education by winning three national championships in academics.

George has taught at UAF for 24 years and has also won several major awards as a novelist and short story writer.  This was his first attempt at a screenplay.