Tom Noyes Awarded 2009 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship
Tom Noyes, assistant professor of creative writing at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, has received a $5,000 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (PCA) 2009 Individual Creative Artists Fellowship in the literature-fiction category.
Noyes’ second story collection, Spooky Action at a Distance and Other Stories (Dufour Editions, 2008), was a finalist for the Richard Sullivan Prize and the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction.
His first book, Behold Faith and Other Stories (Dufour Editions, 2003), was shortlisted for Stanford Libraries’ William Saroyan Prize, 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.”
Noyes’ fiction has appeared in numerous journals, including American Literary Review, Image, Pleiades and Third Coast, and has won The John Gilgun Award for Prose and The Whetstone Prize.
Before joining the Penn State Behrend faculty, Noyes taught creative writing at Indiana State University and at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn. He is a consulting editor for Lake Effect, Penn State Behrend’s national literary journal, and previously worked on the editorial staffs of Ascent and Quarter After Eight. He earned an M.F.A. at Wichita State University and Ph.D. at Ohio University.
PCA Fellowships are awarded to encourage and enable outstanding Pennsylvania artists to perform, publish, and display their work. PCA is a state agency whose mission is to foster the excellence, diversity and vitality of the arts in Pennsylvania, and to broaden the availability and appreciation of those arts throughout the state.
The School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, 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 within the school often collaborate with faculty on research and outreach programs, and have access to technology-enhanced classrooms, including state-of-the art digital editing and psychology laboratories. 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 to its students.