Ann Pancake

Ann Pancake is a fiction writer. Her collection of short stories, Given Ground (University Press of New England), won the 2000 Bakeless Award sponsored by Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. Other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, a Pushcart Prize, the Glasgow Prize, a Whiting Award, creative writing fellowships from the states of West Virginia and Pennsylvania, the Thomas Wolfe Prize, a Bread Loaf Fellowship, and the Emerging Southern Women Writers Contest. Her fiction and essays have appeared such journals and anthologies as Glimmer Train, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Mid-American Review, and New Stories from the South. She holds a PhD in English literature from the University of Washington and teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University, in Tacoma. Ann is currently finishing a novel about mountaintop removal mining in southern West Virginia entitled Strange as This Weather Has Been, told from seven different perspectives and featuring a family living in a community directly below a massive mining operation.

As part of her Fellowship’s Meet the Artist requirements, Ann held an event on the Washington State University campus in Pullman. She first gave a reading from her novel Stranger As This Weather Has Been at the Washington State Art Museum. Her novel was a 2008 finalist for the Orion Book Award. Over 80 people attended, and the reading was followed by a Q&A session at which many enthusiastic audience members participated. The next morning she met with a creative writing class of 20 students and discussed fiction writing. “I’d never even been in that part of the state, and it was a great experience,” she reported.