Professor named finalist for PEN/Faulkner Award


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USC Distinguished Professor of English Percival Everett is one of five finalists for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction. The award is the  largest  peer-juried honor for fiction writers. Everett was nominated for his novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell.

Everett has  written more than 20 books and is the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Fiction, the Dos Passos Prize and others.

The winner, announced on April 2, will receive $15,000 and the four remaining finalists will receive $5,000 each. All five honorees will be recognized at a ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. on May 10.

More than 420 novels and short story collections published in 2013 were considered for the award, with submissions from 132 publishing houses, from which a panel of three judges selected the five finalists.

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell focuses on the relationship between a father and son, with the narration switching between the two characters. The novel is broken into two sections, titled “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus,” a reference to the two names given to Venus in the morning and evening sky, respectively.

The novel was received well by critics including Mark Athiakis of the Washington Post who called the work, “a potent and thoughtful exploration of the bonds between fathers and children.”

Everett received his M.A. in fiction from Brown University and has been a professor of English at USC since 1998. He received the status of Distinguished Professor in 2007. He has previously taught at the University of Notre Dame and the University of California Riverside.

In addition to its award for fiction, currently in its 34th year, the PEN/Faulkner Foundation also hosts a reading series at the Folger Shakespeare Library, the PEN/Malamud award for excellence in short story, and the Writers in Schools program which brings distinguished authors to public schools in the capital.

The other finalists are Daniel Alarcón for At Night We Walk in Circles, Karen Joy Fowler for We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Joan Silber for Fools and Valerie Trueblood for Search Party: Stories of Rescue.