Pam Durban, the Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at UNC, has won the 2007 Goodheart Prize for Fiction for her story, “The Jap Room.”
The Goodheart Prize from Shenandoah magazine is awarded annually for the best story published in the magazine. Founded in 1950 by a group of Washington and Lee University faculty and students, Shenandoah has achieved a wide reputation as one of the country’s premier literary quarterlies.
James Lee Burke, a Goodheart Prize judge, said of Durban’s work: “The narrator’s voice possesses poetic cadences that are so natural they seemed … almost effortless. Irwin Shaw once said that the mark of a professional is to make a difficult task look easy. Ms. Durban does just that. … Perhaps the most convincing part of the story is the way it addresses loss and death. … Few authors can portray mortality as realistically as Ms. Durban does.”
Before coming to UNC in 2001, Durban was a professor at Georgia State University and had been director of the creative writing program at Ohio University. Durban was founder and co-editor of the Georgia State literary journal, Five Points, which won the National Council of Literary Magazines’ 1998 Best New Journal Award. Her novel, So Far Back, was honored with the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Fiction.
Durban, a native of Aiken, S.C., received an undergraduate degree from UNC-Greensboro and an MFA from the University of Iowa.
Read more about Durban’s work in an upcoming feature profile in the spring ’08 issue of Carolina Arts & Sciences magazine.
