Peterkin Winner Announcement
The winner of the 2009 Julia Mood Peterkin award is Laura van den Berg.

Converse College is pleased to announce that Laura van den Berg has received the 2009 Julia Peterkin Award in Fiction. Berg will receive the award of $1,000, plus she will receive travel expenses to give a reading from her award-winning fiction at Converse College.

Laura van den Berg, a native of Florida, received her MFA at Emerson College. The recipient of scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers' Conferences and the 2009-2010 Emerging Writer Lectureship at Gettysburg College, her fiction has or will soon appear in One Story, Boston Review, Epoch, The Literary Review, American Short Fiction, StoryQuarterly, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2008, Best New American Voices 2010, and The Pushcart Prize XXIV: Best of the Small Presses, among other publications.

The winner of the Dzanc Prize, Laura's first collection of stories, What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us, will be published by Dzanc Books in October 2009.

Established in 1998 by the Department of English and Creative Writing at Converse College, the Julia Peterkin Award is a national contest honoring the finest young poets and writers in America. The award is named for Converse graduate Julia Mood Peterkin who won the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for her novel Scarlet Sister Mary.