Students piled into the Lamar P. Higgins Ballroom, filling the chairs and hugging the walls, listening as award-winning nonfiction author Patricia Foster read an excerpt from her 2023 memoir “Written in the Sky: Lessons of a Southern Daughter.”
Foster received the annual Hall-Waters Prize from Troy University on Friday, a life-time achievement award of $5,000 given to a person who has made significant contributions to Southern heritage and culture in history, literature or the arts. Foster is the first recipient who has won for nonfiction.
Foster’s book explores the way race, class and privilege have affected her family story and personal identity. Foster said she hoped the audience left with a greater appreciation of creative nonfiction as a genre.
“I hope that they part with a sense of openness to nonfiction as a genre and to the sense of the essay being a capacious genre, something that can be incredibly fulfilling and incredibly diverse,” Foster said. “One of the things that writers do is present one voice, but I'm presenting one voice that is trying to talk about larger issues, about my own identity, so I think that we need that in our culture.”
This is the third consecutive year in which senior English majors taking English 4495 (senior seminar), taughtby English Department Chair Dr. Kirk Curnutt, will oversee organizing and publicizing the ceremony.
Carolyn McInnis is a Dothan, Alabama native and one of Curnutt’s students. McInnis said she was deeply inspired by Foster’s work.
“I believe, personally, that nonfiction gets kind of shunted to the side as something that... can be dry, or can be unfun or unpopular, but there's such an importance with nonfiction because it encourages us to look at our own history and our own selves in a creative way that we haven't seen before.,” McInnis said. “I just believe that English is so important to enrich ourselves and enrich the people around us.”
Curnutt said he was proud of how well the event went.
“I am always very proud of the professionalism and enthusiasm our seniors demonstrate,” Curnutt said. “It’s a great way to show off to the Troy leadership, the city community and the literary establishment in Alabama how formidable our majors are.”
Foster, a native of Fairhope, Alabama is the professor emerita at the University of Iowa’s MFA Program in nonfiction and is the recipient of a 2020 Pushcart Prize, the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction and the SFA Prize for the Novel.
"I hope that they part with a sense of openness to nonfiction as a genre and to the sense of the essay being a capacious genre, something that can be incredibly fulfilling and incredibly diverse." -Patricia Foster
In addition to taking questions from the students in English seminar, she took questions from the audience. She encouraged students to not be afraid to write about the South, even if it seems like a small subject.
“I went to Los Angeles thinking, ‘Oh, if you're gonna be sophisticated, you have to write about cities and diversity more complicated things than a provincial town,’” Foster said. “It was my UCLA professor who said, ‘No, you write about what your experience is, and it doesn't matter where that comes from.”
The Hall-Waters prize is endowed by the late Dr. Wade Hall, a Troy alumnus and author, in memory of his parents Wade Hall, Sr. and Sarah Elizabeth Waters.
The recipient of the prize is determined by the beneficiary of Dr. Hall’s state alongside Curnutt.
“Writers are always excited to receive commendations for their work because usually we send it off into the void and it just disappears, so an award for career achievement validates a lot of hard work and sacrifice,” Curnutt said. “Most of our recipients challenge stereotypes of what it means to be Southern, so they really feel like the award recognizes how they have worked to expand perceptions of regional identity.”
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