Pam Durban
Pam Durban is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and educator. She grew up in Aiken, and the city and its environs serve as settings for much of her fiction. She is the author of three novels, two collections of short stories, and scores of short stories and essays published in literary journals and magazines.
She holds a B.A. degree from UNC-Greensboro and an M.F.A. degree from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has been a newspaper reporter, founder and editor of a literary magazine, and professor of creative writing at Georgia State University. She now holds the first Doris Betts Distinguished Professorship in Creative Writing at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Her novel So Far Back is set in Charleston of the 1830s. The novel centers on the complexities of race relations and the myriad evils of slavery. Her more recent novel The Tree of Forgetfulness has at its core the 1926 lynching of three black tenant farmers in Aiken County and the frightful effects of the crime on generations of both black and white citizens and their families. She has said, “I’m not an apologist in any way for the South, or a Southerner with a capital S. I do write a lot about the past in the South and the reluctance, even refusal, or whatever you want to call it, to look at that past.”
Through the years, her work has received noteworthy awards and recognition. In 1999 her short story “Soon” was included in The Best Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Her novel So Far Back received the 2001 Lillian Smith Award in Fiction. In addition, she has won the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Whiting Writer Award, and the Rinehart Award for Fiction. She is now working on a book of nonfiction and concentrating on a memoir of her father.
-- Charles Israel
She holds a B.A. degree from UNC-Greensboro and an M.F.A. degree from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She has been a newspaper reporter, founder and editor of a literary magazine, and professor of creative writing at Georgia State University. She now holds the first Doris Betts Distinguished Professorship in Creative Writing at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Her novel So Far Back is set in Charleston of the 1830s. The novel centers on the complexities of race relations and the myriad evils of slavery. Her more recent novel The Tree of Forgetfulness has at its core the 1926 lynching of three black tenant farmers in Aiken County and the frightful effects of the crime on generations of both black and white citizens and their families. She has said, “I’m not an apologist in any way for the South, or a Southerner with a capital S. I do write a lot about the past in the South and the reluctance, even refusal, or whatever you want to call it, to look at that past.”
Through the years, her work has received noteworthy awards and recognition. In 1999 her short story “Soon” was included in The Best Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike. Her novel So Far Back received the 2001 Lillian Smith Award in Fiction. In addition, she has won the Townsend Prize for Fiction, the Whiting Writer Award, and the Rinehart Award for Fiction. She is now working on a book of nonfiction and concentrating on a memoir of her father.
-- Charles Israel