Carolyn Ferrell, John C. Zacharis Award

John C. Zacharis Award  Ploughshares and Emerson College are pleased to present Carolyn Ferrell with the seventh annual John C. Zacharis Award for her collection of stories, Don't Erase Me, which was published this summer by Houghton Mifflin. The $1,500 award -- which is funded by Emerson College and named after the college's former president -- honors the best debut book published by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between fiction and poetry.

Carolyn Ferrell, who is thirty-five, was born in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. She started writing early -- at the age of six, in fact. "I began to compile my rhyming (and often terrible) poems into a notebook, then went on to stories," she says. "I was obsessed with spelling as a child. I once had an argument with my first-grade teacher over a word. I was convinced the word was 'pizza' because I knew 'pizza' had a p and an i and a z in it. We argued for a long time. My teacher tried in vain to explain to me that it could be a different word. It was actually 'prize.' It wasn't until I reached the fourth grade and was introduced to the word 'appreciate' that the world of elusive spellings finally hit me with full, and sometimes devastating, force."

Eventually, Ferrell conquered and embraced the vagaries of language, and she attended Sarah Lawrence College for a degree in creative writing. She took classes with Allan Gurganus and Grace Paley, and, after graduating in 1984, she lived in Germany for four years -- first through exchange programs to study German literature, then on a Fulbright scholarship to work as a high school teaching assistant. An accomplished violinist, Ferrell was also a member of several orchestras in Germany, including the Berlin Sibelius Orchester and the Brandenburgisches Kammerorchester. In 1988, she returned to the U.S. and began teaching adult literacy in Manhattan and then in the South Bronx, where she also directed a family literacy project.

While enrolled in the master's program in creative writing at City College of New York, Ferrell began submitting her stories to journals and published them in Callaloo, The Literary Review, and Fiction. In 1993, her story "Proper Library" appeared in Ploughshares and was then selected for The Best American Short Stories 1994 by Tobias Wolff. The story also prompted Houghton Mifflin editor Janet Silver to call Ferrell, inquiring if she had a book manuscript. "I had only three stories to show her at the time," Ferrell remembers, "but a month later, she offered me a contract."

The finished collection, Don't Erase Me, features eight first-person stories, eight singular voices that incandescently mix lyricism and street patois to portray the lives of mostly poor black girls. The subjects are sometimes grave -- sexuality, domestic violence, AIDS, incest -- but somehow her characters carry with them an unfailing passion and hope. Ferrell says, "Originally, I'd planned for the collection to center around the story 'Wonderful Teen' and focus on a coming-of-age theme set in California, dealing with family drama, parental strife, and race issues, among other things. But once I wrote 'Proper Library,' I decided to bring in other dimensions. I liked reading the black/interracial/overweight girl everywhere: in California, in New York, in the South Bronx, in Germany."

Ferrell gives much credit for her work to the writer Doris Jean Austin. "Before she died in 1994, she taught me a great deal about the art of writing, through conversations and in workshops of the New Renaissance Writers, a black writers' group that she led. Her perception of good writing and the questions writers must ask themselves as they perfect their craft influenced me profoundly."

Ferrell is currently working on a novel that takes on Long Island in the seventies and eighties, with the teenaged narrator trying to make sense of the cultural blends and divisions in her life as historical and political events intrude with strange, resilient agency. In addition, Ferrell teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence and is finishing her Ph.D. in English at City University of New York. She and her husband, the psychologist Linwood Lewis, who also teaches at Sarah Lawrence, are expecting their first child in January.

The John C. Zacharis Award was inaugurated in 1991. The past winners are: Kevin Young for Most Way Home; Debra Spark for Coconuts for the Saint; Tony Hoagland for Sweet Ruin; Jessica Treadway for Absent Without Leave; Allison Joseph for What Keeps Us Here; and David Wong Louie for The Pangs of Love. The award is nominated by the advisory editors of Ploughshares, with founding editor DeWitt Henry acting as the final judge. There is no formal application process; all writers who have been published in Ploughshares are eligible, and should simply direct two copies of their first book to our office.