May 26, 2009

The Richard Wright Literary Excellence Award for 2010 will be awarded to Mississippi novelist Steve Yarbrough, who taught in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at California State University, Fresno.

Yarbrough is leaving Fresno State this summer for a position in the Department of Writing, Literature and Publishing at Emerson College in Boston.

Winning the Wright Award puts Yarbrough in distinguished company of previous honorees whose work includes “a strong Mississippi connection” such as Eudora Welty, Willie Morris, Beth Henley, Shelby Foote, Richard Ford, John Grisham, Margaret Walker Alexander and William Raspberry.

Dr. Robert S. McElvaine, a historian and chair of the history department at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss., is the other Wright honoree for 2010.

Dr. David Sansing, who chairs the Wright Award committee and is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Mississippi, said, “Mississippi's literary tradition … is a marvel in the world of letters. But these literary giants have not stifled creative writing in Mississippi; they have inspired another wave of gifted writers. On the crest of that second wave is Steve Yarbrough.”

Word of the award came May 19, Yarbrough’s final day at Fresno State. He was the James and Coke Hallowell Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing and a mainstay of the Master of Fine Arts program within the College of Arts and Humanities.

Yarbrough came to Fresno State in 1988 after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Mississippi and an MFA from the University of Arkansas. He established a reputation for short stories before first novel, “The Oxygen Man,” was published in 1999. It was followed by “Visible Spirits” in 2001, “Prisoners of War” in 2004 and “The End of California” in 2006.

His most recent novel is set in Fresno and Mississippi. The book, said Sansing, “is evidence of Richard Wright's refrain, ‘You can take the boy out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the boy.’”

Yarbrough won the California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club of California in 2000 and was the John and Renee Grisham Visiting Southern Writer-in-Residence at “Ole Miss” in 1999-2000. He was a finalist for the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 2005 for “Prisoners of War.”

"James and Coke Hallowell have made it possible for me to pursue my two lives – writing and teaching – without slighting either one,” Yarbrough said of their gift to Fresno State for the chair he held.

“Fresno State has an excellent writing program and I expect it will do many more great things in the future,” he said.

Emerson College, a private college that emphasizes communication, has an enrollment of about 2,600 students.

The Wright Award was established in 1994. It will be presented at the annual Natchez Literary and Cinema Celebration, Feb. 25-28, 2010.

“Oddly,” said Yarbrough, who was born and reared in Indianola, Miss., “I’ve been all over Mississippi, but I never made it to Natchez before.”

In his native Indianola, however, he was appointed to the National Advisory Board for the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, honoring the famed blues musician.