California State University, Fresno English professor Steve Yarbrough has been named one of five finalists for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. The national prize is awarded each year for the best work of fiction by an American author.
Yarbrough was selected for his novel, “Prisoners of War,” published in 2004.
The winner, who will be announced in April, will receive $15,000; the four finalists will receive $5,000 each. All five authors will be honored during the 25th Annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., on May 14.
The other finalists are: Jerome Charyn for “The Green Lantern,” Edwidge Danticat for “The Dew Breaker,” Ha Jin for “War. Trash” and Marilynne Robinson for “Gilead.”
The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction judges — David Anthony Durham, Herbert Gold, and Kathryn Harrison — considered more than 300 novels and short story collections by an American author published in the U.S. during the 2004 calendar year.
“Prisoners of War,” Yarbrough’s third novel, is a World War II-era story that explores questions of morality and social inequity in a Mississippi farming town when a group of German POWs are quartered at a local camp and sent to work as day laborers on nearby farms.
Yarbrough, is a native of the Mississippi Delta town of Indianola, joined the Fresno State faculty in 1988. He has received several awards in recent years, including the California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club of California in 2000 and the John and Renee Grisham Visiting Southern Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi in 1999-2000.
After establishing a national reputation as a short-story writer, Yarbrough published his first novel, “The Oxygen Man” in 1999. His second, the critically acclaimed “Visible Spirits,” was published in 2001.
In April 2001, an anonymous donor endowed a professorship for Yarbrough to lighten his teaching load and allow him to spend more time on his writing.
