The recent grad will take home $1000 for her story,“The New Neighbor.”
The spring of 2011 has been an eventful one for Eve Gleichman. First, in May, she graduated from Haverford with a degree in English, then, just a month later, the aspiring writer found out that she won the esteemed Stony Brook $1000 Short Fiction Prize for her story,“The New Neighbor."
“I was shocked!” says Gleichman, who was at one of her many current odd jobs—babysitting—when she got the news of her win.“The email pops up, and the subject line is ‘Stony Brook Fiction Prize results,' which I'm used to seeing two months after a winner's been selected—you know, just an email saying that you weren't selected. So I open it up begrudgingly, and the email just said, ‘Eve, comma, you won.' I freaked out. But the only person around to tell was a three-year old eating Cheerios.”
The Prize, which is awarded to an undergraduate writer from an American or Canadian college or university, is a monetary one, but also includes free admission to next summer's two-week Southampton Writers' Conference and consideration for publication in The Southampton Review, the literary journal published by the Stony Brook Southampton MFA program in Writing and Literature.
Though one of her stories (“The Things I Have Been”) was included in Bennington College's 2009 best undergraduate writing anthology, Plain China, this Stony Brook Prize is the first award that the Maryland-raised Gleichman has won for her work.
“The New Neighbor” was part of her Senior Thesis, a two-story collection titled“Leaving The House: Stories.” Gleichman's advisor, Visiting Assistant Professor of English Tom Devaney, praises the ways her work uses“minimal prose style to a quirky maximal effect” and describes her writing as“post-hyperbolic.”
“I was so proud of Eve when I heard she won,” he says.“She's so talented and good-natured, [and] the fiction award is an affirming gesture, which is helpful for any writer, but especially a younger writer.”
Gleichman, who is currently living in Ardmore and looking towards a career in magazine or book publishing, is encouraged by the Prize to keep writing.“This gives me some hope that it can be possible to write and be recognized,” she says of her win.“It gives me some hope that I can have some success with it in the future.”
