Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Spring 2012

The Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction Ploughshares is pleased to present Angela Pneuman with the first annual Alice Hoffman Prize for Fiction for her short story, “Occupational Hazard,” which appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Ploughshares, guest edited by Colm Tóibín. The $1,000 award, given by acclaimed writer and Ploughshares advisory editor Alice Hoffman, honors the best piece of fiction published in the journal during the previous year.

About Angela Pneuman “Occupational Hazard” has its roots in a temp job at the Indiana Department of Water. The man in charge knew that Pneuman was an English major and let her edit the sewage treatment reports. “I was,” she writes, “a natural.” She used this experience for background, but the heart of the story is her “fascination with the ways regular-enough people end up behaving badly toward one another. It seems, sometimes, that only the most obvious sins against others—here a man’s sexual involvement with a vulnerable teen—reach our consciousness and that the distracting nature of these offenses allows a multitude of the less obvious kind to remain unaccounted for.”

Currently, Pneuman divides her time between Napa Valley and Chicago, teaching creative writing at Stanford and writing marketing materials for wineries. Her first book was the collection of stories Home Remedies, published in 2007 by Harcourt. For the past six years, she has been working on a novel about the family of a self-proclaimed prophet in an evangelical town in rural Kentucky. This book is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2013, along with another book of short fiction, which will include “Occupational Hazard.”