News and Events
Alumna Holly Goddard Jones Wins 2007 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award
Jones, 27, has just completed her first story collection, Girl Trouble. Her work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, Epoch, and The Southern Review. Her story "Life Expectancy" was selected by Edward P. Jones to be included in New Stories from the South: The Year's Best. Jones was raised in Kentucky, which serves as the setting for much of her work. Her nominator says, "She applies the compass from her upbringing to the sophisticated narratives she fashions. That is, she is never tempted by her own cleverness to veer from the story's true soul. Her characters span every age group, and their problems and thoughts are thoroughly steeped in real life."
Lee K. Abbott, who served as Jones' thesis director, said "I am tickled all sorts of silly and pink that Holly has won a Jaffe fellowship; at the same time, I am not surprised, in the main because Holly is among the most gifted writers I've had the honor to teach in my thirty-plus years at the other end of the seminar table. Hers are pages that set the standard for us all, me foremost." After earning her MFA, Jones taught at Denison University, and has recently moved back to Kentucky to teach creative writing at Murray State University. She will use her Writer's Award to work on her novel, Magnetic North.
The award, started by the novelist Rona Jaffe and given annually to six women writers, offers encouragement and financial support to women writers of demonstrated excellence and promise in the early stages of their career. It is the only national literary award dedicated to helping women writers exclusively. Since its inception in 1995, $750,000 have been awarded. Past recipients of the Writers' Awards include Judy Budnitz, Lan Samantha Chang, ZZ Packer, Tracy K. Smith, and Mary Szybist.
