A story, "Fla. Boys," by Heather Sellers, associate professor of English at Hope College, has been named winner of the Paul Bowles Fiction Prize for 1997.
The prize, awarded by the literary magazine "Five
Points," published by Georgia State University, includes a
stipend of $1,000 and publication of the story in the fall
issue of the magazine. Sellers will go to Georgia State in
March to read the story at a recognition ceremony.
Sellers earned her bachelor's, master's, and
doctorate at Florida State University. She joined the Hope
faculty in 1995 after teaching for three years at the
University of Texas at San Antonio. Her stories and poems
have been published in many journals and magazines, and have
received numerous awards and honors.
Sellers is a regionalist, a Southern writer who
has been influenced by Flannery O'Connor, Jill McGorkle and
Lee Smith. She focuses primarily on women's coming-of-age
fiction.
"Fla. Boys" is set in Florida, in a tiny town near
Orlando called Christmas. The story is part of a
collection, "Never Told Me," which was a top-20 finisher in
the Iowa Short Fiction competition in 1996 and was runner-up
in the 1996 Associated Writing Programs competition for best
Collection of Short Fiction for 1997.
In the summer of 1997, she was selected for a
residency at the Millay Colony for the Arts in New York and
a Hawthornden International Residency for Writers in
Scotland. She is currently at work on a novel, "Georgia
Underwater."