Winner of the 2024 Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction The winning piece is an excerpt from Elisabetta's book in progress by the same title. Not Your Cinema Paradiso -- A story about girlhood, love, belonging, not belonging—what we leave behind when we go onto the rest of our lives. A young woman is trying to decipher where she’s come from and where she's headed while her family's cinema business in Venezuela is quickly deteriorating. Set in the late 70s and early 80s, we are thrown into a world crossing national borders and see how completely our lives can change, and how quickly.