Williams Professor Wins Award for Short Story
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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Jim Shepard, the J. Leland Miller professor of American History, Literature and Eloquence in the Department of English at Williams College, has won the 2016 Rea Award for the Short Story.
This is the second consecutive year a member of the Williams English department has won the award. Last year, Andrea Barrett, senior lecturer in English, won the award.
Shepard is the author of five short story collections and seven novels. His most recent collection is "The World to Come" (2017, Knopf), about which The Daily Beast wrote, "Without a doubt the most ambitious story writer in America, Jim Shepard spans borders and centuries with unrivaled mastery … [his] characters face everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to historic catastrophes on a global scale. Shepard makes … these wildly various worlds his own, and never before has he delineated anything like them so powerfully."
A professor at Williams since 1983, Shepard teaches creative writing, contemporary literature, and film.
"It's always a little stunning to have the good fortune to be singled out for any recognition," Shepard said, "but it's particularly wonderful when those providing the recognition are writers whose work you so admire."
The jurors for this special year, the Rea Award's 30th anniversary, were previous winners Deborah Eisenberg, Amy Hempel and Joy Williams. They wrote this citation for Shepard's award: "In the course of visiting other centuries, a range of nations, and the homes of ordinary citizens, Jim Shepard has — in five stellar collections of stories and seven novels — proved himself an original, darkly funny, and deeply humane writer. His prodigious research combined with a kind of X-ray vision of the soul produces stories that we learn from, that improve us, that expand our sense of what a life can be. He is a master of stance and throwaway wit. His scholarship and surpassing imagination work in tandem in matchless stories that glorify the commonplace and understate the extraordinary. He reveals people — not 'characters' — through sports, history, dogs, drama, the Hindenburg. He sees the everyday violence of family life as both a given and an illimitable mystery. He shows us the world as it could have been, as it is, and to cite his most recent collection: 'The World to Come.'"
Born in Bridgeport, Conn., in 1956, Shepard received his bachelor's degree from Trinity College in 1978 and his M.F.A. from Brown University in 1980. Shepard lives in Williamstown with his wife, writer Karen Shepard, their three children and three beagles.
Under the direction of Elizabeth Richebourg Rea, the annual $30,000 Rea Award is named in honor of Michael Moorhead Rea, a passionate reader who wrote short fiction and collected first editions of American short stories. To administer the annual award, Rea established the Dungannon Foundation, which is named for his paternal hometown in Northern Ireland. In addition to the Rea Award for the Short Story, Dungannon also sponsors the Rea Visiting Writers and Rea Visiting Lecturers at the University of Virginia.
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