Nonfiction Writing Program Professor Patricia Foster has been awarded the 2017 Clarence Cason Award in Nonfiction Writing.

The Clarence Cason Award honors writers who “have made a critical contribution to the journalism and literature of the South.” Past recipients of the prestigious award  have included some of the greatest names in contemporary nonfiction, such as E.O. Wilson, Rick Bragg, and Gay Talese.

Honorees for the Clarence Cason Award are chosen by a selection committee based at the University of Alabama. On accepting the award, Foster will also present a lecture at the university. 

Foster is the author of All the Lost Girls: Confessions of a Southern Daughter, Just Beneath My Skin, and most recently, Girl From Soldier Creek, a novel about two sisters and their complex relationship with the South, family, and each other.

Girl from Soldier Creek was praised by writer Janet Burroway as “an essential and quintessential American story, as Katherine Soldier, known as Jit, struggles to leave behind the territory of its title—a humid, fecund terrain, a problematic family and its tangle of love, resentment, and entrapment,” and by writer Phillip Lopate: “The sensuous, visually elegant prose will keep you enthralled.”

Foster has served as editor for four anthologies: Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul, Sister To Sister, The Healing Circle (co-edited with Mary Swander), and Understanding the Essay (co-edited with Jeff Porter). She has published more than fifty essays and stories in publications including Ploughshares, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Iowa Review, and received, among many honors, the PEN/Jerard Award and the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award in Nonfiction.

Foster has taught writing and literature in the Nonfiction Writing Program and the UI Department of English for more than twenty years.

“To experience Patricia, both in person and on the page, is to recognize a force,” said NWP graduate student Anne Sand. “She's one of those professors who becomes the adviser on your shoulder, whose advice stays with you as you improve as a writer and thinker.  My experience of her work is much the same.  Her stories have sunk deep.”

“From the mesmerized looks of her audience at readings, and the discussions I've had with some of my fellows, I don't think I'm unique in this experience,” Sand said. 

For the past forty years, the Nonfiction Writing Program has encouraged students to explore new approaches to creative nonfiction while also developing an appreciation for the deep history of the genre. Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program is offered by the Department of English, within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.