New English faculty member is runner-up at contest

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

New English faculty member is runner-up at contest

 J.C. Hallman, a new faculty member in OSU’s English Department, will receive a $2,500 prize as runner-up in a contest to write about “The Night” co-sponsored by Creative Nonfiction Foundation and The Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Hallman submitted “Spate and Spite” an essay that reports on a series of suicides as experience through the eyes of a young casino employee.

 “Evoking the tattered world of Atlantic City, a place of perpetual night, this piece fused reporting (about a “spate” of suicides in town) with a vivid first-person narrative,” says Susan Orlean, contest judge, author and staff writer for The New Yorker.

 J.C. Hallman studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Iowa. He has published three books of nonfiction and one collection of short stories and will teach creative writing at OSU, starting this fall. 

 Hallman will appear in Pittsburgh for a reading in August.