The Department of English is pleased to announce that MFA graduate E.J. Levy has been chosen as the 2011 winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for her collection of stories, My Life in Theory. The collection will be published in 2012 by the University of Georgia Press.

     E.J. Levy received her MFA from The Ohio State University in 2002 and has been consistently, and successfully, writing ever since. Among her many works are the anthology, Tasting Life Twice: Literary Lesbian Fiction by New American Writers, which she won a Lambda Literary award for. The Library Journal called the anthology “beautiful, sad, sweet, moving, and defiant.”  Her essays have appeared in Best American Essays, The New York Times, The Nation, Orion, Salmagundi, Kenyon Review, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: 1970 to the Present. Her fiction has been published in the Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, and North American Review, among other fine publications.

     The Flannery O’Connor Award was established in 1983 as a way to encourage new and gifted writers to present their work nationally. Two winners are chosen annually for their talent as short story writers and this year, one of our very own claims this honor.

     E.J. Levy splits her time between Washington, D.C. and Taos, New Mexico. She teaches in the PhD Program at University of Missouri-Columbia one semester each year, and coming up this October, she will be a feature presenter as part of a panel on teaching the essay at Fordham University. In addition, her memoirs, Amazons, will also be published in 2012. 

Report by Andrea Leigh Hilliard, AU11 Website Intern