Two Women Win Prairie Schooner Book Prizes

Prairie Schooner is a national literary journal which was founded in 1927. It currently is housed within the department of English at the University of Nebraska and is published with the cooperation of the University of Nebraska Press. Recently, the journal awarded its 2011 Prairie Schooner Book Prizes.

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize for fiction was awarded to Karen Brown, an instructor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She was honored for her manuscript Leaf House. Brown will receive a cash award and her book will be published by the University of Nebraska Press. Her first collection of short stories, Pins and Needles, was the recipient of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction and was published in 2007 by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Brown is a graduate of Cornell University and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Florida.

Susan Blackwell Ramsey, who teaches creative writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, won the 2011 Prairie Schooner Book Prize for Poetry. Her book, entitled A Mind Like This, will be published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Ramsey is a graduate of Kalamazoo College and earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of Notre Dame.