Terese Marie Mailhot
Please join me in congratulating Terese Marie Mailhot, visiting assistant professor of English, for recently winning a pair of writing awards with her bestselling book, Heart Berries: A Memoir (Counterpoint, 2018).
The Whiting Foundation selected Terese as a nonfiction honoree for the Whiting Award, which goes to promising early-career writers of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama. Terese is one of 10 winners for 2019, each of whom received a $50,000 prize at a March 20 ceremony in New York City. The award’s selection committee named Heart Berries “one of the most important memoirs of the last five years. There is a purity to this nimble, jarring work.”
Terese also recently won the first Spalding Prize for the Promotion of Peace and Justice in Literature. Presented by the School of Creative and Professional Writing at Spalding University, the award and accompanying $7,500 prize honor works of literature that exemplify Spalding’s mission and its community’s core commitment to compassion.
Of Heart Berries, Spalding Chair of the School of Creative and Professional Writing Kathleen Driskel wrote, “Her prose is fierce, unflinching, yet lyric and finely wrought. Rarely have I read such anguish rendered so beautifully. It makes me wonder what I can make new in my own work. Heart Berries reminds me the writing I love most ardently and come back to again and again encourages me to understand old things in different ways.”
Terese is scheduled to visit Spalding on May 30-31 to accept the award and visit with members of the school’s literary community.
Congratulations, Terese!
David A. Reingold
Justin S. Morrill Dean
College of Liberal Arts