LINDA BUSBY PARKER RECEIPIENT
OF 10TH ANNUAL JAMES JONES FIRST NOVEL FELLOWSHIP
Wilkes-Barre, PA (November 25, 2002)
The Humanities Division at Wilkes University and the James Jones
Literary Society recently announced the winner of this year’s James
Jones First Novel Fellowship.
Linda Busby Parker of Mobile, Alabama, was awarded the $5,000 first
prize earlier this month. She will be formally recognized at the
annual
meeting of the Society next fall at the University of Texas in
Austin. The award is given annually in honor of the late
James Jones, author of
From Here to Eternity (1951), Some Came Running (1957), The Ice-Cream
Headache and Other Stories (1967) and many other works.
The University’s Humanities Division administers the contest, which was
established in 1992, to honor the spirit of unblinking honesty,
determination and insight into modern culture exemplified by James
Jones.
The novels of several previous winners have been published.
Parker’s manuscript, The Sum of Augusts, was chosen out of 665
submissions to the contest. Set in rural Alabama in a mythical
community between Montgomery and Birmingham during the years 1954-1994,
the novel traces the struggle of an African-American, Brewster McAtee,
to build his own house
and better himself. Caught in the crossfire of events set against
the
backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement in the deep South, McAtee’s
situation
illumines an important era in American history. According to one
of
the judges, J. Michael Lennon, Professor of English at Wilkes,
“Parker’s
prose is lucid and lyrical and her story one of the most moving we have
seen
in the ten years of the Jones Fellowship.”
A former university professor of communication at the University of
South Alabama in Mobile, Parker earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at
the University of Michigan and her B.A. at the University of the
South. She gave
up her tenured position six years ago to devote herself full-time to
writing. She attended summer writing programs at Indiana
University, Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont and also at Kenyon
College in Ohio. Chapters
of her novel resulted in the award of a Heartland Fellowship at Indiana
University in 2000. She is currently a student in the MFA program
at Spalding
University in Louisville, Kentucky. She is married with three
daughters
and is working on a second novel, also set in the South and dealing
with
the Civil Rights Movement.
The runner –up in this year’s contest and given a $250 prize is E. A.
Bagby of Chicago, Illinois, for her novel titled Rook. The title
character, Rook, is the food critic for a big-city newspaper who has
taken too many
free meals and bribes and begins to disintegrate. The discovery
of
an unknown relative gives him the opportunity for revitalization.
“Rook
is fast-paced and full of surprise turns; Bagby’s prose is as delicious
as
the food she describes,” said Lennon.
Bagby grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico and studied film and
comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri,
where she graduated summa cum laude in 1998. Her essays appear in
Conversely (www.conversely.com) and The Writing Group Book (ed. Lisa
Rosenthal, Chicago Review Press, 2003). Her short story, “S,” is slated
for publication in the anthology Choices: Short Stories.
Bagby has acted in a number of local theatrical productions and she
writes a column on acting for Preview, the subscriber journal of
Chicago’s American Theater Company. She is now working on a
second novel titled The Crosses set in her native Las Cruces. She
is also working on both stage and screen plays.
The judges for this year’s contest were Kaylie Jones, the daughter of
James Jones and author of four novels; Kevin Heisler, a New York-based
writer;
Dr. Patricia Heaman, Professor Emeritus of English at Wilkes, and
former
English Department chair; and Dr. J. Michael Lennon, Professor of
English
and Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs at Wilkes.
The James Jones First Novel Fellowship welcomes inquiries on the
contest. Requests for guidelines should be sent with a S.A.S.E.
to James Jones First Novel Fellowship, c/o English Department, Kirby
Hall, Wilkes University,
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766, or via email to English@wilkes.edu.
Submission
deadline is March 1st of each year.