The Monroeville Literary Festival and the Truman Capote Prize Committee are pleased to announce that Allen Wier has been selected as the recipient of the 6th annual Truman Capote Prize for Distinguished Work in Literary Non-Fiction or the Short Story. The Capote Prize is sponsored by Dianne Lawson Baker and is chaired by Dr. Don Noble.
Allen Wier (pronounced Wire) has published four novels: Tehano (Southern Methodist University Press, 2006), A Place for Outlaws (Harper & Row, 1989), Departing as Air (Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Blanco (LSU Press, 1978, Avon/Bard 1980, and Harper & Row 1989), and two collections of stories: Late Night, Early Morning (University of Tennessee Press, 2017) and Things About to Disappear (LSU Press, 1978 and Avon/Bard, 1980). He's edited an anthology, Walking on Water and Other Stories (University of Alabama Press, 1996), and co-edited Voicelust, a collection of essays ‘on style in contemporary fiction’ (University of Nebraska Press, 1985). Wier’s fiction, essays, and reviews appear in such publications as The Southern Review, Five Points, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and the New York Times. He was named Travel Writer of the Year 1994 by the Alabama Bureau of Travel.
In 1997, Wier received the Robert Penn Warren Award conferred by the Fellowship of Southern Writers to "recognize an outstanding young Southern writer of fiction." In 2001, he was voted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and has since served on the board and in 2009 been elected Vice Chancellor,a and in 2011 Chancellor. In November 2008, Wier received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. In July 2010, he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission.
Wier has degrees from Baylor University (BA), LSU (MA), and Bowling Green State University (MFA). He has taught at Longwood College, Carnegie-Mellon University, Hollins College, the University of Texas, Florida International University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he received the Hodges’ Chair for Distinguished Teaching, and where, in 2005, the graduate students in English voted Wier the department’s “most outstanding professor in the classroom.” In the summer of 2012, he taught in the University of New Orleans’ low-residency MFA program’s Edinburgh Workshop in Scotland. In September 2012, he was Visiting Eminent Scholar at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. From 2013-2015 he was the UC Foundation’s Inaugural Visiting Writer/Scholar at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. Summer 2014, 2015, and 2016 he was on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. From Fall 2016 through Spring 2020, he served as the Watkins Endowed Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Murray State University in Kentucky.
Born in San Antonio, Texas an only child, Wier grew up in Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico--where his father explored the jungles of Veracruz seeking ferns and flowers to import for the wholesale flower business in San Antonio.
Allen Wier is currently writing a memoir - novel, The No Rules Trip, revising the draft of a novel, Skin For Skin, and working on new short stories. New short fiction in Narrative and an essay in an anthology from LSU Press are forthcoming in 2021. He and his artist wife, Donnie, live on a brow overlooking Lake Guntersville in North Alabama.
For more information about Wier’s work, please visit www.allenwierfiction.com .
Wier will receive the Truman Capote Prize during the virtual Monroeville Literary Festival on Friday, March 5, 2021, at 6:30pm. To register for this session and others, please visit www.MonroevilleLiteraryFestival.com . The Monroeville Literary Festival is a project of Coastal Alabama Community College. It is made possible by the generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Alabama State Council on the Arts.