Holsaert named winner of 2019 Albright Nonfiction Prize
Faith S. Holsaert has been named the winner of the North Carolina Literary Review’s 2019 Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize for “Matrilineal.” Selected from a record number of submissions this year, “Matrilineal” will be published in NCLR’s 2020 issue, and Holsaert will receive a $1,000 prize made possible by an NCLR donor.
Final Judge Tony Earley chose Holsaert’s essay for the prize.
Faith S. Holsaert (Contributed photo)
“I found myself mesmerized by the writing. Set in the lost worlds of mid-century Manhattan and pre-Duvalier Haiti, the piece is lyrically evocative in its world-building and precisely focused in its concerns — the ways in which we seek to combine the families into which we are born, and the families we choose for ourselves, into the one family that will keep us alive,” Earley said. “It’s a remarkable piece of writing about a remarkable confluence of American lives.”
Earley is an author of fiction and memoir, and the Samuel Milton Fleming Chair in English at Vanderbilt University. He grew up in North Carolina.
Holsaert has published fiction since the 1980s and has begun to publish poetry. She is a co-editor of Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (University of Illinois Press, 2010). She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa and lives in Durham with her partner, Vicki Smith. “Matrilineal” is part of a longer piece in six parts.
Other finalists for the 2019 prize include Corey Stewart Hassman of Greensboro for “Revelation in the Wreckage,” Chantal James of Raleigh for “This Dimension,” Patricia Poteat of Asheville for “There but for the Grace: An Appalachian Memoir,” Marissa Schwalm of Concord for “On Mother,” and Cheryl Skinner of Greenville for “Menagerie of the Dead.”
The Alex Albright Creative Nonfiction Prize was created in 2015 to honor the founding editor of the North Carolina Literary Review. The first Albright Prize winner was published in the 25th issue of NCLR in 2016. The competition requires no submission fee, but writers must subscribe to NCLR or join the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association. Either the writer or the subject matter of the submission must have a North Carolina connection. For submission and subscription information, visit nclr.ecu.edu.
Additional funding for the 2019 competition came from the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
-Contact: Margaret Bauer, NCLR editor, bauerm@ecu.edu, 252-328-1537