Betsy Cox to receive literary award

By Cindy Landrum  

SEPTEMBER 9, 2010 2:06 p.m. (0)

Elizabeth Cox doesn’t mind being called a Southern writer as long as it doesn’t limit her readership, she said in an interview published on identitytheory.com, an online literary Web site.

Sometimes, she said, it even helps.

“There is a strong backload of writers behind me that are very good,” Cox said in the interview.

Count her among them.

Cox, a professor at Wofford College who shares the John C. Cobb Chair in the Humanities with her husband, Michael Curtis, will be inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers in April 2011. She will receive the organization’s Robert Penn Warren Award for her body of work.

Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” will also be inducted into the fellowship in April.

The Fellowship of Southern Writers was founded in 1987 by a group of writers who met in Chattanooga, Tenn.

It is a nonprofit organization with an objective to promote literature in the South. It commemorates outstanding literary achievement, encourages young writers through awards, prizes and fellowships and recognizes distinction in writing by election to membership.

Members include Shelby Foote, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, James Dickey, Fred Chappell, Walker Percy, Jill McCorkle, Josephine Humphries and Greenville native Dorothy Allison.

Cox is a poet, short story writer, essayist and novelist. Her books include “The Slow Moon,” “Night Walk,” “The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love,” “Familiar Ground,” and the story collection, “Bargains in the Real World.”

Cox, who was raised in Chattanooga, did not start writing until she was in her early 30s. Both of her brothers had published books of poetry and Cox, whose children were in school, decided she could, too. She wrote poems and short stories.

After she attended a writers’ conference in Saranac Lake, N.Y., an agent encouraged her to write a novel. She said she would although she had no idea how to do it, she said in an interview published on the Random House Web site.

She enrolled in a sonata and symphony course at Duke University. She said she remembered how a symphony would build and fall while she was writing.

For her second novel, Cox took an astronomy course, she said in the Random House interview. For the third, she read nature books and studied biology.

“To me, fiction is a powerful way of telling the truth – more powerful, I think, than factual accounts. Story offers a peripheral vision different from the regular way of looking at the world or at human nature,” she said in the interview. “Stories show us something by telling us to look somewhere else.”