FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
[GREENVILLE, NC]
The North Carolina Literary Review announces the recipients of two awards for the 2025 print issues’ content: the John Ehle Prize and the Randall Kenan Prize. The recipients each receive a $250 honorarium.
The John Ehle Prize, funded by Press 53 of Winston-Salem, is awarded to the author of the best work we’re publishing that year on a writer whose work has not (yet or in some time) received the critical attention it deserves. This year, Katherine Henninger wins for her essay “The Real Thing: Wise-Cracker Childhood in Kaye Gibbons’s Ellen Foster.” Berry College Professor and NCLR Board member Christina Bucher made the selection from 2025 issues’ qualifying content, stating, “Through a close reading, a compelling comparison to Huck Finn, and application of diverse critical views from Fred Hobson to Toni Morrison, the author asks us to view Ellen Foster with new eyes, one that must recognize just how rootbound whiteness continues to be in the work of Southern white writers writing race.”
Henninger is the Russell B. Long Associate Professor of English at Louisiana State University. She is the author of Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing (University of North Carolina Press, 2007) and is currently at work on two monographs: “The Mandingo Effect: U.S. Slavery and Sexuality on Screen, 1968–2018,” and “Made Strangely Beautiful: Southern Childhood in U.S. Literature and Film.” The latter has been supported by a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities and focuses on representations of Southern childhood in film and literature. Additionally, she has published essays on Southern literature, childhood studies, photography in literature, and film studies, as featured in journals such as Southern Quarterly and American Literature.
The Randall Kenan Prize, funded by the UNC Chapel Hill Creative Writing Program, recognizes the best work we’re publishing that gives critical attention to a new (or newish) North Carolina writer. The 2025 honor goes to Anna Creadick for her essay on Carter Sickles’s 2020 novel The Prettiest Star, “Back to the Future: Carter Sickels and the Heavy Lift of Appalachian AIDS Fiction.” LSU Professor Michael Bibler selected this essay from eligible content, stating, “This essay combines a big heart with a big scope. The title puts Carter Sickels at the center of the inquiry, but the essay’s real focus is the ‘heavy lift.’” Bibler notes that this essay “‘goes big’ by charting all the things that these novels continue to do as we ‘feel backward’ and build solidarities that are intimately anchored in place and time as well as being transregional and transtemporal.”
Anna Creadick grew up in Boone, NC, and is George E. Paulsen ’49 Professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She has written about whiteness, reading, disability, teaching, Dolly Parton, William Faulkner, Willa Cather, Carson McCullers, and other subjects for a variety of publications, including Southern Cultures, Appalachian Journal, and, Legacy.
Subscribe now to receive the 2025 print issue this summer, which will include Henninger’s and Creadick’s essay, as well as the winners announced previously of the 2024 creative writing contests in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Consider too what North Carolina writer you might write about or interview to introduce or re-introduce to NCLR’s readers. 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.
###
