Poetry Center Awards Paterson Fiction Prize
Friday, July 20, 2012 • 7:43am
PATERSON, NJ - The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College recently announced the winner and finalists of the annual Paterson Fiction Prize for 2012. The First Prize of $1,000 was awarded to Steve Almond of Arlington, MA, for his book God Bless America: Stories (Lookout Books/University of North Carolina Wilmington, Wilmington, NC). Judge Laura Boss says that Almond’s “amazing versatility, inner psychological landscapes, and sardonic humor prove he is one of the outstanding short story writers of his generation. If Steve Almond were examined by a literary ophthalmologist, the diagnosis would be 20/20 literary vision.”
The Finalists for this year’s Paterson Fiction Prize are: Mending: New and Selected Stories by Sallie Bingham of Sante Fe, NM (Sarabande Books, Louisville, KY); Sweet Hope by Mary Bucci Bush of Pasadena, CA (Guernica Editions, Toronto, ON, Canada); Boundaries byElizabeth Nunez of Amityville and Brooklyn, NY (Akashic Books, New York, NY); My New American Life by Francine Prose of New York, NY (Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY); The Uncoupling by Meg Wolitzer of New York, NY (Riverhead Books, New York, NY).
The Paterson Fiction Prize is given annually by the Poetry Center for a novel or collection of short stories published in the previous year. For rules and application form, visit www.pccc.edu/poetry or send an SASE to Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Executive Director, The Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College, 1 College Blvd., Paterson, NJ, 07505-1179.
The Poetry Center was named a Distinguished Arts Project and awarded several Citations of Excellence, and is funded, in part, by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts and by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
