Pancake, Award-Winning Author, to Give Free Public Reading at Converse
Ann Pancake, winner of numerous awards for her short stories, will give a free public reading Tuesday, Jan. 16 at 8 p.m. in the Barnet Room of the Montgomery Student Center at Converse College. Pancake is serving as Converse’s Writer-in-Residence for January Term and her reading is made possible by the Coker Visiting Writers at Converse. For more information, call 596-9000.
In 2005, Pancake won the Julia Peterkin Award, which was established in 1998 by the Department of English and Creative Writing at Converse, and 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.”
Pancake’s short story collection, “Given Ground,” received the 2000 Bakeless Award sponsored by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Other prizes she has received include the Whiting Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and writing fellowships from West Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Her fiction and essays have appeared in Shenandoah, Virginia Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train and New Stories from the South.
Pancake completed her BA in English at West Virginia University, her MA at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and her PHD in English literature at the University of Washington. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. Currently, she is finishing a novel about mountaintop removal in southern West Virginia.