John C. Zacharis Award Winner Maile Meloy

John C. Zacharis Award Ploughshares is pleased to present Maile Meloy with the thirteenth annual John C. Zacharis First Book Award for her collection of stories, Half in Love (Scribner, 2002). The $1,500 award—which is named after Emerson College's former president—honors the best debut book by a Ploughshares writer, alternating annually between fiction and poetry.

This year's judge was John Skoyles, who is a Ploughshares trustee. In choosing the collection for the John C. Zacharis Award, he said: "The stories in Half in Love are spare but not minimal; not a word is out of place in this stunning collection. Maile Meloy has the ability to sum up a life in a sentence or two, and the lives she writes about are infused with drama and human struggle. Above all, these stories read beautifully, so deft is the writing, so inviting is the pacing and diction. This work is taut, gripping, and powerful."

Maile Meloy was born in Helena, Montana, in 1972. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Ontario Review, Witness, and Best New American Voices 2000, and she won the 2001 Aga Khan Prize for best story in The Paris Review. Half in Love received the 2003 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the 2003 Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Meloy received her M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. On the experience of a writing program, she says, "It was exactly what I needed: I'd been working full time, writing stories on my office computer at night, and the M.F.A. program gave me great readers, a teaching job, and time to write without feeling like it was an odd self-indulgence, because it was what you were there for."

Asked how the stories in Half in Love came about, Meloy writes: "I wrote most of the book while I was at UC Irvine, and some of it in the two or three years before, while I was working at a series of jobs. I was trying to learn how to write stories, and happy when it felt like it worked. I was interested, and still am, in the things that no one can plan for or guard against: desire, jealousy, betrayal, illness, injury, loss, death. In real life anything can happen, you can get blindsided—in short stories, no matter what happens, chaos has order."

About assembling the collection, she writes, "I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and threw a lot of stories out, and cut up a list of the titles so I could put them in different order. What I wound up with was a book that was set in different decades, partly in Montana—and those stories were some of the hardest to write, because it's the place I'm closest to—and partly in other places, in London and Paris and Greece. So it had very little temporal or geographical unity, but the characters are all caught between one thing and another, half in love with something or someone, when life deals them something they didn't expect."

Meloy's first novel, Liars and Saints, was published this past summer by Scribner. She lives in California.