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Doris Betts Receives the 2008 AWP/
George Garrett Award For Outstanding Community Service in Literature
Each year at the AWP Annual Conference and Bookfair, AWP bestows upon a new recipient the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature. This year’s award went to the novelist Doris Betts of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Doris has already received countless awards and honorary degrees for her wonderful work as a novelist and short-story writer, for her excellence as a teacher, and for her generosity as a community activist. Doris has served on many philanthropic boards, including the board of AWP, back in the association’s formative years, three decades ago.
Betts has taught many writers who launched notable careers: Randall Kenan, Jill McCorkle, Robert Morgan, and Russell Banks. “As mentor, teacher, cheerleader, and muse, she has been especially invaluable to the women’s writing community in North Carolina,” her fellow novelist Lee Smith wrote, “I might never have attempted a university job without Doris’s urging, which practically amounted to a good swift kick in the butt… Doris Betts has shown us all that a wonderful life involves deep commitment to family, to community, and always to art.”
Betts’s books include Souls Raised from the Dead, Heading West, Beast of the Southern Wild, The Scarlet Thread, and Tall Houses in Winter. One of her frequently reprinted stories, “The Ugliest Pilgrim,” was adapted into a play and then into a screenplay; it garnered a New York Drama Circle Critics Award and even an Academy Award.
In his opening remarks at the recent AWP Conference and Bookfair, Executive Director David Fenza said “AWP is happy to add another honor to Doris’s catalog of honors. Doris Betts is a great example of what makes our programs such effective places in the cultivation of the next generation of writers, readers, and lovers of literature. We are grateful for the depth of her talents and for the generosity of her heart.”
For more information on the George Garrett Award, please visit AWP’s website. The members of AWP are encouraged to send letters to nominate someone for the Award every year between August 1 and September 15. The award is named after one of the founding members of AWP, George Garrett, for his exceptional work as a writer, editor, teacher, mentor, and builder of our literary community.
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