September 26, 2007 | People
MEDIA CONTACT: Pat Vaughan Tremmel at p-tremmel@northwestern.edu
What a Week! Dybek Receives MacArthur Fellowship and Rea Award
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Stuart Dybek | photo by Nick Infusino |
EVANSTON, Ill. --- Stuart Dybek, the first Distinguished Writer in Residence at Northwestern University, was named a 2007 MacArthur Fellow, an honor that carries a $500,000 “no strings attached” award, according to an announcement by The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Tuesday.
That was followed by today's announcement that Dybek, widely recognized as the living American author most identified with Chicago, is the recipient of the 2007 Rea Award for the Short Story, with a $30,000 prize.
Dybek joins the rarefied group of MacArthur Fellows, including 24 for 2007. The unrestricted MacArthur fellowships are given annually to individuals who have exhibited extraordinary “creativity, originality and potential to make important contributions in the future.”
“The MacArthur choices demonstrate the foundation's value of innovative work that is edgy and crosses boundaries, and often is not widely known,” said Dybek. “This year's fellows include me, who writes about Chicago, and a forensics anthropologist, who has visited some of the most monstrous sites of genocide in the 20th century to tell a story that won't get swept under the carpet. And we have been put in the company with a person who is exploring how spider silk, this miraculous natural fiber, can be used in medical practice.
“By putting together 24 unlikely people for one brief moment, MacArthur is saying focus on the similarities, rather than the differences, of what we are trying to do with our work.”
The Rea Award, established by the late Michael M. Rea in 1986, is one of America's most prestigious prizes for short-story writing. Sponsored by the Dungannon Foundation, the award is based on peer recognition of a living American or Canadian writer whose work has contributed significantly to the short story form and has influenced the genre. Past Rea Award winners include John Updike, Alice Munro, Grace Paley, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Lorrie Moore, Deborah Eisenberg and Cynthia Ozick.
In a sense, Dybek returned home last year with his Northwestern appointment and participation in the University's nationally renowned English Major in Writing for undergraduates. Northwestern's Evanston campus is only a few miles from Chicago, the home of his richly imagined South Side boyhood neighborhood, which he captures with so much heart and hilarity in his writing.
“We were absolutely thrilled to get Stuart back in the Chicago area, the setting of his writing,” said Daniel Linzer, Northwestern's provost. “He not only is a great writer, but he also is an excellent teacher who communicates his passion for writing with students.”
Dybek is the author of three books of fiction. “Childhood and Other Neighborhoods” (1980) is his first book; “The Coast of Chicago” (1990) was the 2004 selection of Chicago's “One Book, One Chicago,” in essence a citywide book club; and “I Sailed with Magellan” (2003) was chosen by the New York Times and the American Library Association as a notable book of the year and by the Chicago Tribune as the best book of the year.
His two collections of poetry are “Brass Knuckles” (1979) and “Streets in Their Own Ink” (2004). His writing has been frequently anthologized and has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry and TriQuarterly.
The recognition of Dybek's work with two big honors, announced within a day of each other, confirms the standing he has with peers as well as with his growing readership following the publication of his recent books.
“The writer's life is feast or famine, and this is his time to feast,” said Andre Dubus III, one of the Rea Award jurors. “The beauty of these two awards is that it gives Stuart well-deserved time to create. And that benefits all of us. His work is about working-class Chicago in the mid-20th century, but it's about the rest of us, too.”
“His latest book of fiction, 'I Sailed with Magellan,' is a delight to read and at the same time a marvel of fictional technique and substance,” said Reginald Gibbons, professor of English and classics and the director of the Center for the Writing Arts at Northwestern. “Again Dybek takes the very ordinary life of a few people in humble circumstances in Chicago and shows how very far from ordinary they are.”
“Streets in Their Own Ink,” Dybek's latest book of poetry, shares the virtues of his fiction, but in a “more compact, intensely significant way,” Gibbons added.
In both books, Dybek continues to fill in his Chicago landscape of factories, viaducts and boarded-up storefronts with lively rhythms and unforgettable imagery. As usual, his protagonists run the city's streets, crossing all kinds of boundaries, including the nearly mythical divide between the north and south sides of Chicago. His characters often skirt or fuel the dangers of the streets, and Dybek brings their experiences alive with extraordinary language, authenticity and humor.
Dybek attempted to describe the Chicago tradition of writing in response to a question he was asked in 2001 when he was a visiting writer in residence at Northwestern's Center for the Writing Arts. “As a generalization, I'd hazard emotion,” Dybek said. “Feeling is something you risk as a Chicago writer, and there is a sense of heart to many of the stories. A lot of where that heart is coming from is an understanding of class, which, of course, is connected to immigration and assimilation. It's a rare element in American writing.”
Following the death of Saul Bellow in 2005, the Chicago Sun-Times “spent the better part of a week calling around town to writers, booksellers, academics and editors to see who the big Chicago writers are in this post-Bellow era.” According to Chicago Sun-Times reporter Tom McNamee, “Only Dybek was named by everyone.”
Other honors for Dybek's work include the PEN/Bernard Malamud Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, several O. Henry Prizes, a Lannan Prize and two Pushcart Prizes.
Before joining the Northwestern faculty, Dybek was a professor of English at Western Michigan University, where he directed its MFA program.
Four other Northwestern faculty members previously received MacArthur Fellowships: Jennifer Richeson, associate professor of psychology, in 2006; Aleksandar Hemon, an instructor of creative writing in the School of Continuing Studies, in 2004; Amy Rosenzweig, professor of biochemistry, molecular biology and cell biology, in 2003; and Mary Zimmerman, professor of performance studies, in 1998.