Professor Harriet Pollack of Bucknell University has been selected as the 2008 recipient of the Phoenix Award, given on occasion by the Eudora Welty Society to an individual whose contributions to Welty Studies have been exceptional.

"In selecting Harriet for this year’s award, the officers of the Welty Society and past recipients of the Phoenix Award extend appreciation for her contributions to Welty scholarship, the Society, and to the larger community of Welty’s students and admirers," wrote Society President Barbara Ladd, Professor of English at Emory University.

"Harriet’s has been a major shaping voice in all things Weltean with two important edited collections of essays, Having Our Way: Women Rewriting Tradition in Twentieth-Century America (1995), and, with Suzanne Marrs, Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? (2001). This Award also recognizes the invaluable contribution of her own essays and, in particular, the 1998 Kirby Award-winning essay, “Photographic Convention and Story Composition: Eudora Welty's Use of Detail, Plot, Genre and Expectation From ‘A Worn Path’ Through ‘Bride of The Innisfallen’” (1997), a ground-breaking study of the intersection of photographic and narrative ways of seeing in Welty’s work," Ladd continued.

The presentation of the Phoenix Award will be held next spring at either the Society for the Study of Southern Literature meeting in Williamsburg or the American Literature Association meeting in San Francisco.