When it comes to writing awards, readers, critics and other writers seek knowledge from those who have excelled. How did they do it? What and who inspires them? What is their writing process? Where do the ideas, phrases, characters and plots come from and how do those things journey from mind to page? Moderator Lisa Graves Minor, English professor at the University of North Alabama, pulled answers to those burning questions from the two Literary Arts Fellowship winners during the Alabama Writers Symposium in Monroeville.

Chantel Acevedo

Chantel Acevedo, a young author who's first novel, “Love and Ghost Letters,” won the Latino International Book Award, was named Literary Fellow by the Alabama State Council on the Arts in 2012.

She gave the audience some details behind the award-winning novel.

“It is solidly Josephina's story, but it's also a father-daughter story,” she revealed. “This is also a love letter to my grandmother. Every lesson that I learned as a child was through a story. It was traumatizing and inspiring.”

When asked what took her from inspiration to Latino International Book Award, she said, “It's mainly hard work, because if you don't follow through, then it's just an idea. You grab the time when you can.”

As a former high school teacher and current English professor and writer-in residence at Auburn University, she said that teaching feeds her writing and vice versa.

“One doesn't surplant the other,” she offered. “Good students challenge me; it's very complimentary.”

She said other inspirations include Marilynne Robinson, “Game of Thrones,” Cristina Garcia's “Dreaming in Cuban.”

And where are they leading her?

Acevedo said she is now writing “A Falling Star,” a story of Cuban immigration. This is more of a mothers and sisters story to round out “Love and Ghost Letters” father-daughter plot, she revealed. It tells of a family losing a child during the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba to South Florida.

Adam Vines

Adam Vines's collection of poetry “The Coal Life” was a finalist for the Miller Williams Prize, in addition to his publications in “Poetry,” “Post Road,” “Redivider,” “The Literary Review” and “Hunger Mountain.”

In “The Coal Life,” published in 2012, Vines talks about life in the South, with all it's intensity and eccentricity.

Phrases like, “Yesterday, snow, not stars, fell on Alabama,” grace section four of the elegy and “I saw only the dying of another year . The mountain face turned to clay. For a moment, I was suspended above it all,” in his poem “Red Mountains.”

He also describes a mother's love and understanding in a house full of men in his poem “Toilet Flowers” and the love of a father for his little girl and fear of her growing up in “This Little Piggy.”

He explained that much of the relationship references and delving into place was to get at a larger issue.

“I was figuring out what my relationship was to my father in this book,” Vines divulged.

He explained that the book talks about coal-mining communities in the 1930s and 40s.

“They got the devil in them,” he said. “There's a lot of Calvinist affliction.”

He added that, “The child persona was a vehicle for my own anxieties.”

“Alabama poets are insane,”he laughed. “To disappear from the world, I go to the natural world, the bay and river. Something always draws me back to the water. Fishing — there's something about the thought of alluring something. My blue-collar sensibilities come out when I'm writing. I compose lines in my head.”

Aside from the natural world, writing influences include George Herbert, John Donne, Flannery O'Connor and David Jones and Marianne Moore.

What's next for Vines?

He said he's currently working on ekphrastic poems (poetry written to works of art).