Author Charles Portis will be honored next month in Little Rock with the Porter Prize Lifetime Achievement Award.
Portis, an El Dorado native who was raised in the south Arkansas towns of Norphlet, Mount Holly and Hamburg, served in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War and earned a journalism degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville before embarking on a newspaper career.
He worked for the Commercial-Appeal in Memphis, the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock and the New York Herald-Tribune, eventually becoming its London bureau chief.
Portis has written five novels: Norwood, True Grit, The Dog of the South, Masters of Atlantis and Gringos. True Grit was adapted into two movies. In 2012 - Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany - was released, collecting his journalism, travel stories, short fiction, memoir and a three-act play.
Three nationally known writers - Roy Blount Jr., Jay Jennings and Roy Reed - will be among the speakers at the event honoring Portis.
The Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by the Porter Fund, an organization supporting the literary arts in Arkansas, is given every five years to an Arkansas writer with a substantial and recognized body of work. Previous recipients of the award include novelist Donald Harington in 2004 and poet Miller Williams in 2009. The award includes a prize of $2,000.
The Porter Fund was founded in 1984 by novelist Jack Butler and novelist and lawyer Phillip McMath to honor Ben Kimpel, a professor of English at UA-Fayetteville. The Porter Fund Literary Prize is named in honor of Kimpel’s mother, Gladys Crane Kimpel Porter. An annual prize of $2,000 is given to an Arkansas writer.
The Porter Fund has established a $4,000 scholarship to support the first-place winner of the Thea Foundation’s Creative Writing Scholarship. At the gala honoring Portis, Thea Foundation Executive Director Paul Leopoulos and 2014 Creative Writing Scholarship first-place recipient Annika Miller of Conway High School will speak about the charitable donation.
The gala is scheduled for 6 p.m. April 3 at the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock.
Tickets for the event are $200 each, and corporate tables seating 10 people are available for $2,000. More information, including reservations, is available by calling (501) 868-7172 or writing the McMath Law Firm, 711 W. Third St., Little Rock, Ark. 72201.
Arkansas, Pages 20 on 03/16/2014