Creative writing lecturer wins book award
Paul Hendrickson, a lecturer in the Creative Writing Program, has won the 2003 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction for his new book, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy.
The book tells the stories of seven white Mississippi sheriffs shown in a 1962 Life magazine photograph as they prepare to defend the University of Mississippi from James Meredith's attempt to integrate it. The book illustrates not only racial views of these men, but also the part their views have played in the lives of their children and grandchildren. In 1999, Hendrickson was named a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow for his work on the book.
A prize-winning feature writer for the Washington Post
for more than 20 years, Hendrickson now has a full-time appointment
in the Creative Writing Program, where he teaches advanced
nonfiction and a workshop in the documentary tradition. At
the Washington Post, he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize
six times. He has published three other books, two of which
were finalists for the National Book Award and the National
Book Critics Circle Award.
He has degrees in American literature from St. Louis University and Pennsylvania
State University.