NCLR is extremely proud to announce the recipients of three awards for 2024 issues’ content: the John Ehle Prize, Randall Kenan Prize, and Paul Green Prize. Each award comes with a $250 honorarium.
The John Ehle Prize, funded by Press 53 of Winston-Salem, is for the best of the year’s critical essays on and interviews with North Carolina writers whose work has not received significant critical attention. This year, Elaine Neil Orr wins for her essay “Diving into the Wreck: A Review Essay on David Payne’s Trilogy,” forthcoming in the spring online issue. Barton College Professor Emerita Rebecca Godwin made the selection from 2024 issues’ qualifying content, saying, “This essay makes us want to read David Payne’s memoir and novels. It establishes the complexity and deep humanity of Payne’s work, his philosophical wrestling with life’s big questions, including the past’s impact on our lives, as it also explores his relationship to major American writers.”
Orr is a Professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. A creative writer as well as literary scholar, Orr is the author of two monographs on women’s literature, a memoir about growing up in Nigeria, and two novels, including Swimming Between Worlds (2018), with a third novel forthcoming in 2025. She was interviewed for NCLR by Kathryn Stripling Byer in the 2015 issue.
The Randall Kenan Prize, funded by the UNC-CH Creative Writing Program, recognizes the best published work giving critical attention to a new(ish) North Carolina writer. The 2024 honor goes to Zackary Vernon for his interview with Mark Powell, forthcoming in the print issue. NCSU English Professor Barbara Bennett selected it from eligible content, saying, “I found the questions asked to be compelling and engaging. They led Powell to comment not just on his work but on southern literature and culture in general. He was led to discuss things wider and deeper than just the literature.”
Vernon is the editor of two scholarly collections, one on Ron Rash and one on environmental literature of the South, and has also published in The Bitter Southerner, Southern Cultures, and NCLR (among others). In 2015, he won NCLR’S inaugural Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize, and his Prize essay was published in the 2016 issue. Vernon is currently Associate Professor of English at Appalachian State University and the Nonfiction Editor for Cold Mountain Review. His debut YA novel, Our Bodies Electric, is forthcoming this summer from Regal House Publishing .
The Paul Green Prize, funded by the Paul Green Foundation, is to encourage scholarship on the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright – like Donald Paul Haspel’s essay “Abandoned Roanoke: A Sixteenth-Century Mystery, Interwar Anxiety, and Historical Speculation in Paul Green’s The Lost Colony.” ECU Professor Emeritus E. Thomson Shields, Jr. remarked that Haspel’s essay allows readers “to see beyond the drama’s strictly American themes coming from its sixteenth-century setting and the Depression-era context in which it was written.” Shields notes that Haspell shows us how “Green interweaves themes based on sixteenth-century European politics and the international politics of the 1930s, growing out of Green’s World War I experiences and extending to the Spanish Civil War being fought at the same time he was writing The Lost Colony. Haspel expands the contexts we can see reflected in Green’s symphonic drama.” This essay will be published in our print issue this summer.
Haspel is an Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. This essay will be his debut in NCLR, but he understands our regional focus. He notes that growing up in Bethesda MD and vacationing on the Delaware coast, his own literary interests “have changed over time into a more specific interest in literature and culture of the Chesapeake Bay region.”
Subscribe now to receive the 2024 print issue this summer, which will include Haspel’s Green essay and Vernon’s Powell interview. And look for the premiere spring issue of NCLR Online with Orr’s essay on Payne in early April. Consider too what overlooked or new North Carolina writer you might write about or interview for NCLR. Find our submission guidelines on our website.
Produced since 1992 at East Carolina University and published by the University of North Carolina Press, the mission of NCLR is to preserve and promote North Carolina’s rich literary culture. NCLR introduces new and emerging writers; reintroduces forgotten authors; showcases work in literary criticism, interviews, book reviews, fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry; and reports on literary news stories. We complement the writing with the work of North Carolina artists and photographers.
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