October 7, 1993

Contact: Craig D'Ooge (202) 707-9189

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Three Syndicated Fiction Award Winners to Read at the Library of Congress

Rick Bass, Joshua Henkin, and Rosa Shand, authors of three of the Syndicated Fiction Project's 1992 annual best short stories, will read their award-winning stories on Thursday, November 4. The program is co-sponsored by the Library's Gertrude Clarke Whittall Poetry and Literature Fund and the Syndicated Fiction Project and will be presented at 6:45 p.m. in the Mumford Room on the sixth floor Madison Building. The stories were judged by author Herbert Gold.

Immediately following the reading, the audience is invited to attend a reception for the authors in the ground-level foyer of the Madison Building. The reception, co-sponsored with the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, will celebrate the opening of "Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America," a traveling exhibition made possible by a generous grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund.

"Language of the Land," part of the Center's Literary Heritage of the States project, will be on view at the Library of Congress until January 17, 1994. It will also travel throughout America under the auspices of 16 affiliated state centers for the book.

Rick Bass, who will read "The Valley," lives in a valley in Troy, Montana, and he is the author of a short story collection, The Watch, as well as five books of natural history, the most recent of which is The Ninemile Wolves. In February of 1994, Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence will publish a collection of his novellas, Platte River. Mr. Bass is currently at work on a novel, Where the Sea Used to Be. His fiction has appeared in many anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prize Stories, New Stories from the South, the Pushcart Prize stories, New American Short Stories, and Best of the West.

Joshua Henkin, whose prize-winning story is "Juggling," was born in 1964 and grew up in New York City. He was educated at Harvard College and at the M.F.A. program at the University of Michigan, where he won the Avery and Julie Hopwood Award in the categories of Short Fiction, Novel, and Essay, and the Roy W. Cowden Memorial Fellowship in Creative Writing. He is third- prize winner of the 1992 Playboy Fiction Contest. Mr. Henkin's essays and reviews have been published in many periodicals, including The New York Times Book Review, Mother Jones, and The Nation, and his short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Cimarron Review, The Seattle Review, The Greensboro Review, Witness, and Ploughshares, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he is at work on a novel. Rosa Shand, who will read "A Good Place Smelled Like Woodsmoke," grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, and has a B.A. degree from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. In 1991 she won the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize for an African story, and she received "Special Mention" in the Pushcart Prize #17. She has twice this year been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and will be a fellow during the holidays this year at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. Ms. Shand's story, "A Good Place Smelled Like Woodsmoke," is part of a collection of African stories she has recently completed.

The stories to be read are prize winners in a special competition of the Syndicated Fiction Project. This program is the seventh Syndicated Fiction Award winners reading presented at the Library of Congress in association with the Project. The Syndicated Fiction Project, directed by Caroline Marshall and based in Washington, D.C., was launched by the National Endowment for the Arts and American PEN under the direction of Richard Harteis in 1982 to make high-quality short fiction available to a broad, nationwide audience.

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PR 93-127
10/14/93
ISSN 0731-3527