LEXINGTON — Award-winning author Bobbie Ann Mason will join the University of Kentucky faculty July 1.

        Ms. Mason, 61, was born in Mayfield, where her father was a dairy farmer.

Author Bobbie Ann Mason stands on the Mayfield, Ky., farm where she was born and raised. (Associated Press photo) | ZOOM |

        Her first book of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories, published in 1982, won the Ernest Hemingway Award in 1983. Her 1993 novel Feather Crowns won the Southern Book Award, and her 1999 memoir, Clear Springs, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

        Ms. Mason has accepted a five-year, nontenured position in UK's College of Arts and Sciences, school officials said.

        “I am delighted to return to UK,” Ms. Mason said. “I have felt a special connection with the university ever since my undergraduate days.”

        She graduated from UK in 1962 and worked in publishing and with magazines in New York. She received a master's degree from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966, and a doctorate in English from the University of Connecticut in 1972.

        Ms. Mason wrote fiction as well as literary criticism, and had stories published in the New Yorker and Redbook, among other magazines.

        Current and past UK English department faculty members include: Kentucky's poet laureate James Baker Hall; novelist and short-story writer Gurney Norman; poet Nikki Finney; poet Maurice Manning; novelist and critic Guy Davenport; poet Jane Vance; novelist, playwright and critic Robert Penn Warren; and novelist, essayist and poet Wendell Berry.

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