Noyes Runner-Up for Grace Paley Prize
Tom Noyes, assistant professor of creative writing in the B.F.A. program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, has been named runner-up for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ 2006 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction for his manuscript Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories.
The association will work with Noyes to secure a publisher for the story collection, his second. Noyes’ first book, Behold Faith and Other Stories, was published by Dufour Editions in 2003. It was short-listed for Stanford University Library’s William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and reviewed favorably in many publications, including the New York Times Book Review, where it was praised for its macabre wit and startling confessions of frailty and delusion.
Novelist Nancy Reisman, the Grace Paley Prize judge, wrote of Noyes’ newest collection: “The smart, sharply-written Spooky Action at a Distance conjures absurdity and pathos in undeniably American landscapes: a road trip from Alabama to Terre Haute, an apartment complex in Albany, New York, a Red Lobster near the Buffalo airport. The characters who stumble through this spooky America are at once bewildered by adult failings—a marital crisis, a death in the family, a new father’s mental instability—and alert to the striking oddness within the ordinary. Spooky Action at a Distance offers a large and irresistible vision, its great empathy shot through with comic insight, its voices keen and energetic, the stories wonderfully surprising.”
Noyes earned his M.F.A. in creative writing at Wichita State University and a Ph.D. at Ohio University, Athens. His stories have appeared in numerous journals, including American Literary Review, Image, Pleiades, and Third Coast, and have won the John Gilgun Award for Prose and the Whetstone Prize for Fiction. In addition, his work has been a finalist in prestigious competitions, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Bakeless Award and the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction.
Before joining the faculty of Behrend’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2004, Noyes taught in the creative writing programs at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and Indiana State University in Bloomington, and worked as an editor on the national literary journals Ascent and Quarter After Eight.
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Behrend offers one associate and eight baccalaureate degree programs, a pre-law curriculum, a fifth-year teaching certification, seven minors and a study abroad program in cooperation with Northampton University in England. Students frequently collaborate with faculty on research and outreach programs, have access to technology-enhanced classrooms, including state-of-the art digital editing and psychology laboratories, and publish Lake Effect, a nationally recognized literary magazine. The school hosts the Creative Writer’s Speaker Series and both the International and Women’s Film Series, plus offers various musical and theater opportunities. For more information, visit www.pserie.psu.edu.