The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill English department plans to award the 2015 Thomas Wolfe Prize to University of North Carolina Wilmington Professor Clyde Edgerton.

The award is given annually to writers with distinguished bodies of work. In addition to this honor, Edgerton is a renowned author and Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor. Edgerton will give a public lecture at UNC Chapel Hill next month. Past recipients of this prize include Sandra Cisneros, Josephine Humphreys, and Lee Smith.

Edgerton was born and raised in rural Bethesda, NC. He attended UNC Chapel Hill for his undergraduate studies and returned there for both his master’s and his doctorate, punctuated by a five-year stint in the Air Force and a one-year period of teaching high school.

Edgerton spent several years teaching at the collegiate level before deciding — after seeing Eudora Welty read one of her short stories on television in 1978 — he wanted to be a writer.

“I had written at that time one short story that I felt was a complete short story,” Edgerton said. “I knew [‘Why I Live At the P.O.’] almost by heart but I’d never seen nor heard [Eudora Welty] read. And I turned on TV one night, May 14, 1978, and there she is reading that story, and the effect was so great that I decided and I wrote in my journal ‘tomorrow I will start being a writer.’”

Edgerton explained that he began work on a second short story the next day, which was the beginning of thirty-six years of fiction writing.

“There were many things before that happened that made me interested in being a writer,” Edgerton said.

He discussed his time at UNC Chapel Hill, where the English department faculty taught him many of the skills he would later use in writing, and where Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms sparked his interest in the novel as a form of fiction.

“I had started to read Ernest Hemingway and other writers… it was as if I was getting ready, and I’d been trying to write, but when I saw [Eudora Welty on TV], and heard her, and had memorized the story, and loved it …that was the big turning point.”

Edgerton commented that receiving the Thomas Wolfe Prize is even more of an honor because it is an award bestowed by his alma mater, for whose faculty and writers he retains much respect.

The body of work earning Edgerton this award includes countless short stories that have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Best American Short Stories, Southern Review, and more.

His most recent of ten novels, The Night Train, was published in 2011, and he is also the author of a book of advice and a memoir. Several of his works have had film or stage adaptations as well.

“He’s a very colloquial writer,” said Elizabeth Davis, a current creative writing MFA student at UNCW who took his Race Issues in Southern Literature course. “He is very entrenched in place and his characters are products of that place. He’s very cinematic. That’s why I think he’s so readable.”

“He’s basically a legend as far as contemporary Southern writing goes,” said Ashleigh Phillips, another creative writing MFA student.

Edgerton’s writing is uniquely Southern and often tackles issues of faith. Edgerton himself was raised as a Baptist fundamentalist.

His experience with the church, leaving it and coming back to it “on different terms,” has allowed him to “write not about issues of faith, but about people who have issues with or about faith or non-faith.”

“Having had different theological views throughout my life based in Protestant Christian fundamentalism,” Edgerton said, “it’s interesting for me to look back at how that might influence characters in my stories.”

After writing full-time for ten years, Edgerton began to consider looking for a teaching job because his daughter, the eldest of his four children, was going to college.

UNCW’s Chancellor at the time, James R. Leutze, approached Dr. Edgerton and asked him to teach in the creative writing department.

Edgerton began work part-time before receiving an offer for a full-time position at UNCW in 2002. He relocated to Wilmington and has taught here ever since while still continuing his writing during the last thirteen years.

“He is basically a Renaissance man. Not only does he write, but he also plays the banjo, sings, takes courses on the side learning how to paint, just [for the Race in Southern Literature course] got his bus driving license so that he could take us all on a trip for that class. He’s always pushing and challenging himself and not afraid to learn new things,” Phillips said.

“He has the energy of a 19 year old,” Davis added, laughing.

“It’s like he’s the beacon of Southern hospitality. He’s so great. If he weren’t there, we would just be another MFA program in the South,” Phillips said.

Although he works primarily with students in the Creative Writing MFA, Edgerton does still occasionally teach undergraduate classes. He works frequently with senior theses in the department and is on thesis committees.

Edgerton said, “My job is to help create a community where students feel at home in telling stories and writing poems.”

He discussed how one of the department’s current goals is to advertise and spread awareness about the usefulness of creative writing degrees in any field, citing that employers are interested in more than just the amount of knowledge that a graduate has accumulated.

“Clearly knowledge is moving at a faster pace than we can keep up with,” Edgerton said, “and therefore how you deal with the knowledge and how you communicate what you need to communicate takes on great importance.”

When asked about final words and advice for aspiring writers, Edgerton said, “My advice is always, to any young writer, to follow no advice that doesn’t make sense to the writer. As a writer learns to accept valid criticism, it’s also important that a writer learns that he or she is unique in the world. Her set of experiences, observations, along with her imagination, make her unique. Therefore, some advice won’t apply to her vision about ‘why’ and ‘how’ she’s telling stories or writing poems.”