April 12, 2011 Adam Prince, a Ph.D. candidate in creative writing at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, has sold his first collection of short stories, The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men. The book will appear late next year from Black Lawrence Press. This is the same publisher which will be bringing out a new poetry chapbook by Prince’s wife, Charlotte Pence. Clearly the Pence-Prince family is having a very good year in a very lousy publishing climate. Not that luck has anything to do with their success: both writers work extraordinarily hard at their craft– and have been working extraordinarily hard at their craft for many years.
“If I include all the workshops I took as an undergraduate, my MFA at The University of Arkansas, what I do now as a PhD. candidate at University of Tennessee, and all the time between, it comes out to about sixteen years of writing fiction,” Prince notes. “There was a lot of work during that time, and a whole lot of rejections. Last year it all finally seemed to come together. So naturally I’m very proud and a big believer in the value of determination. I’m also glad to be with a publisher that has so much momentum. You can just feel it. So many other publishers are playing it safe these days. And that means there’s a lot of interesting writing out there those other presses aren’t willing to pick up. Black Lawrence and the whole Dzanc group has been savvy enough to see that as a great opportunity. And the fact that they’re small is a benefit in this market, because it also means they’re nimble—able to try out new stratagies, to adjust.”
To read the press release about The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men,here. To read Adam Prince’s interview with Dorothy Allison for Chapter 16, click here.
For more updates on Tennessee authors, please visit Chapter 16‘s News & Notes page, here.
