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22 February 2005 Longwood to award Dos Passos Prize to Maureen Howard
Howard, who will receive a $2,000 cash award and a medal, will read from her work, and a reception will follow in the nearby Haga Room. The Dos Passos Prize, administered by Longwood's Department of English and Modern Languages, is awarded annually to a creative writer whose work demonstrates characteristics found in the work of Dos Passos, such as an original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental quality, and a range of literary forms. Howard, who lives in New York City, is the author of nine novels, three of which, GraceAbounding, Expensive Habits and Natural History, were nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her memoir Facts of Life won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Non-Fiction in 1978, and she received the 1997 Award in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which said she "commands what may be the most sublime lyric prose style in America... Maureen Howard is an American original of inimitable, prodigious talent, a major poet of the novel." Publishers Weekly has said her "vigorous prose – at once earthy and sophisticated – is a graceful, arresting mix of metaphor and demotic idiom, ironic humor and glistening images." Her most recent work, published last year, is The Silver Screen, the third book of "what she calls a 'quartet' based on the four seasons," said Dr. Martha Cook, a Longwood English professor who chaired the prize committee and the prize jury. "That's her summer novel. A Lover'sAlmanac, which students are reading in my American Literature course, is the winter novel, and Big As Life, which students in some freshman English courses are reading, is the spring novel. The autumn novel is in progress, as I understand it." Howard, who teaches courses at Columbia University, also has written the novels BridgeportBus and Not a Word About Nightingales, as well as several stories and two plays. Previous recipients of the Dos Passos Prize, founded in 1980, include Tom Wolfe, Lee Smith, Shelby Foote and Ernest Gaines. Funding for this year's prize is from the Longwood Foundation through the office of the vice president for Academic Affairs. |
Novelist Maureen Howard will be awarded the 24 th John Dos Passos Prize for Literature in a ceremony Wednesday, Feb. 23, at 8 p.m. in Longwood University's Wygal Auditorium.