UCA professor wins Porter Prize

Sandy Longhorn, a University of Central Arkansas professor who has written three books of poetry, has won the 2016 Porter Fund Literary Prize, the university announced Thursday.

Longhorn, who teaches writing, will be honored at a ceremony Oct. 27 at the Central Arkansas Library System's Main Library's Darragh Center in downtown Little Rock.

"Given that writing is such solitary work, receiving the Porter Prize is all the more meaningful," Longhorn said in a news release. "I'm honored and thankful to all of my readers, fellow writers and friends for their encouragement, and I'm especially thankful to UCA for creating an atmosphere where creative writers flourish."

The annual prize is awarded to an Arkansas writer with "a substantial and impressive body of work that merits enhanced recognition," UCA said in the release. Accompanying the honor is a $2,000 prize, making it one of the state's most lucrative and prestigious literary awards, the university said. To qualify, a recipient must have an Arkansas connection.

The Porter Prize and the Booker Worthen Literary Prize will be awarded the same evening during the free event, which is open to the public. The Booker Worthen recipient has not been announced.

Longhorn has written three books of poetry: The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths and Blood Almanac.

In an interview Thursday, Longhorn said she is originally from Iowa but came to Arkansas to obtain a master of fine arts degree from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and stayed here.

Longhorn, who lives in Little Rock, said she has enjoyed writing "pretty much all my life ... since grade school or middle school."

Her books are written in a lyric narrative style.

Her first two books are "very much about the agricultural Midwest where I grew up," she said.

Longhorn said she also is interested in how feminism is being shaped in "a very masculine society," and all of her books are connected by "issues of female identity."

Longhorn's third book, The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, also deals with the way illness affects the body and the mind. That book focuses on a fictional character with a fever that hasn't been diagnosed.

"The medical industry treats her like an object, and she begins to lose her sense of self," Longhorn said.

Longhorn also is director of the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference, which will debut in November 2017. Wright, who was born in Mountain Home, died in January in her Rhode Island home. She was 67.

Novelist Jack Butler, and novelist and lawyer Phil McMath founded the Porter Prize in 1984 to honor Ben Kimpel. Butler and McMath were students of Kimpel, an English professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Kimpel asked that the prize be named in honor of his mother, Gladys Crane Kimpel Porter.

Thirty poets, novelists, nonfiction writers and playwrights have received the prize.

NW News on 07/24/2016

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