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Professor wins Drue Heinz Literature Prize
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Tina May Hall has won this year's Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her collection "The Physics of Imaginary Objects."
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The $15,000 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, one of the nation's richest awards for short fiction, goes to Tina May Hall, a 37-year-old English professor at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. She's the 29th winner of the prize.
The University of Pittsburgh Press, which administers the competition, will publish Ms. Hall's short-story collection, "The Physics of Imaginary Objects," this fall.
Press spokeswoman Maria Sticco said her manuscript was chosen from about 350 entries by nonfiction and fiction author Renata Adler.
"This is a remarkable collection," said Ms. Adler. "I am struck in particular by the range of imagination and the prose. The power, insistence, occasional humor, and frequent beauty of the author's voice carry the reader as surely as conventional fiction used to."
Ms. Hall described her book as "miscellany of sorts, or a cabinet of curiosities. The stories test how language determines being, how the body and words interact, how story can be tactical rather than strategic, and how the familiar might be made strange."
Drue Heinz, widow of H.J. Heinz, sponsors the competition, which began in 1981.
Sunday's reading by Ed Ochester for the Pittsburgh Poetry Series has been moved to Feb. 28 because of the weather.
The reading will be at 7 p.m. in the Father Ryan Arts Center, 420 Chartiers Ave., McKees Rocks.
First Published February 12, 2010 12:00 am
