Texas State alumna is finalist for PEN/Faulkner prize
Posted by University News Service
March 6, 2013
Texas State University alumna Amelia Gray has been named one of five finalists for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, America’s largest peer-juried award for fiction.
Gray graduated from Texas State in 2007 with a master of fine arts in creative writing. She is nominated for Threats, her first novel.
The winner, who will receive $15,000, will be announced March 19 at the 33rd Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony in Washington, D.C. The four finalists each receive $5,000.
The judges – Walter Kim, Nelly Rosario and A.J. Verdelle – considered more than 350 novels and short story collections by American authors published in the United States in 2012. Submissions came from 130 publishing houses, including small and academic presses.
Gray’s novel has been hailed by critics for its clever and disquieting depictions of loss and decay. It has earned comparisons to the work of Samuel Beckett and to the films of David Lynch.
Gray is the author of two previous short collections, AM/PM and Museum of the Weird, which won the Ronal Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize. She lives in Los Angeles.
Other finalists are Laird Hunt for his novel Kind One, T. Geronimo Johnson for the novel Hold It ‘Til It Hurts, Thomas Mallon for Watergate and Benjamin Alire Saenz for the collection Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club.