Athens, Ohio - Darrell Spencer, professor of English and Stocker Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio University, was named the 24^th winner of the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize as of February 22, 2004.  The prize carries a cash award of $15,000 and publication of the selected work by the University of Pittsburgh Press.  Spencer’s selected collection of short stories, Bring Your Legs with You, is one among many publications in this prolific writer’s creative works.  Michael Chabon, 2001 Pulitzer Prize fiction winner for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, was the judge for the Heinz competition. 

 

Of the selected work, Spencer states that ”the phrase ‘bring your legs with you’ is one that boxers use; the power behind a punch comes from the legs.  The stories are linked stories and, although they are not really boxing stories, the central figure in all the stories is a boxer.  So that's where it comes from.  It's the same with football; when you're tackling someone, you bring your legs with you.”

 

Spencer “possesses a remarkable ear for the cadence of everyday speech, which makes for some marvelous, rich dialog and, more importantly, firmly grounds the intense, pressured, spare narrative prose in the lives of its fast-talking, smooth-talking, always-talking characters…,” states Chabon of Bring Your Legs with You.  The stories are set in Las Vegas, Nevada where Spencer grew up.  Chabon says Spencer “created a little world, a version of Las Vegas that is clearly and persuasively reflective of the Vegas we know.” 

 

The main character in each story, Tommy Rooke, is a retired boxer considering a return to the ring.  Spencer says, “He lives in a violent world, but a world that’s also full of love for his family and friends.  The collection creates a portrait of a decent man who is all-too-human in the mistakes he makes.”

 

The Drue Heinz Literature Prize has been awarded for over twenty years to recognize, support and promote writers of short fiction.  Prize recipients must have published a book-length collection of fiction or at least three short stories or novellas in commercial magazines or literary journals.  Spencer has certainly done so with his collections which include Caution: Men in Trees, Our Secret’s Out, and A Woman Packing a Pistol.  His short stories have appeared in the High Plains Literary Review, Quarterly West, Shenandoah, the Antioch Review, Epoch, and the Gettysburg Review to name a few. 

 

Spencer joined the College of Arts and Sciences in the fall of 1997 and was promoted to full professor in July 2000.  He obtained an Individual Artist Fellowship in 1999 and again in 2001 from the Ohio Arts Council. In 1998 he was a co-winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for short fiction with his third collection, Caution: Men in Trees, and winner of the Quarterly West novella prize for So You Got Next to the Hammer. 

PAST WINNERS OF THE DRUE HEINZ LITERATURE PRIZE

2003 Suzanne Greenberg, Speed-Walk and Other Stories
Senior Judge: Rick Moody

2002 John Blair, American Standard
Senior Judge: Elizabeth Hardwick

2001 Brett Ellen Block, Destination Known
Senior Judge: C. Michael Curtis

2000 Adria Bernardi, In the Gathering Woods
Senior Judge: Frank Conroy

1999 Lucy Honig, The Truly Needy and Other Stories
Senior Judge: Charles Johnson

1998 Barbara Croft, Necessary Fictions
Senior Judge: Bharati Mukherjee

1997 Katherine Vaz, Fado and Other Stories
Senior Judge: George Garrett

1996 Edith Pearlman, Vaquita and Other Stories
Senior Judge: Rosellen Brown

1995 Geoffrey Becker, Dangerous Men
Senior Judge: Charles Baxter

1994 Jennifer Cornell, Departures
Senior Judge: Alice McDermott

1993 Stewart O'Nan, In The Walled City
Senior Judge: Tobias Wolff

1992 Jane McCafferty, Director of the World and Other Stories
Senior Judge: John Edgar Wideman

1991 Elizabeth Graver, Have You Seen Me?
Senior Judge: Richard Ford

1990 Rick Hillis, Limbo River
Senior Judge: Russell Banks

1989 Maya Sonenberg, Cartographies
Senior Judge: Robert Coover

1988 Reginald McKnight, Moustapha's Eclipse
Senior Judge: Margaret Atwood

1987 Ellen Hunnicutt, In the Music Library
Senior Judge: Nadine Gordimer

1986 Rick DeMarinis, Under The Wheat
Senior Judge: Alison Lurie

1985 W. D. Wetherell, The Man Who Loved Levittown
Senior Judge: Max Apple

1984 Randall Silvis, The Luckiest Man in the World
Senior Judge: Joyce Carol Oates

1983 Jonathan Penner, Private Parties
Senior Judge: Wright Morris

1982 Robley Wilson, Dancing for Men
Senior Judge: Raymond Carver

1981 David Bosworth, The Death of Descartes
Senior Judge: Robert Penn Warren