The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has selected four individual writers and one writing team as winners of the 2013 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Competition.

Listed by alphabetical order, this year’s winners are:
Frank DeJohn & David Alton Hedges, Santa Ynez, CA, “Legion”
Patty Jones, Vancouver, BC, Canada, “Joe Banks”
Alan Roth, Suffern, NY, “Jersey City Story”
Stephanie Shannon, Los Angeles, CA, “Queen of Hearts”
Barbara Stepansky, Burbank, CA, “Sugar in My Veins”

The winners were selected out of 7,251 scripts, the highest entry amount in history for the Nicholl Fellowship competition. Each winner will receive $35,000 to complete a feature-length screenplay. The first portion of the awards will be given at an awards presentation on Nov. 7 at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

For the first time, the awards presentation will include a live reading of selected scenes from the winners' scripts.

According to a press release from the Academy, another first is that "Lexus will engineer a new and innovative extension of the fellowship for the first time. One of the top five winners will be presented with a grant which will allow them to write and produce a short film that will appear on certain Lexus creative platforms such as LStudio.com."

The Academy says casting for the live read will be announced and that tickets to the event are available to the public at www.oscars.org.

Have your screenplay discovered by entering the 2013 ScreenCraft Action & Thriller Script Contest. First place prize is $1,000 cash and a consultation with a top action genre film producer. The contest is open for entries until Dec. 15.