Another Award for Gardner

IWU English Department News
June 1, 2010

It’s been quite the year for Eric Gardner (’89). We just barely announced that he’d won his university’s top honor and now he’s been awarded the EBSCOhost/RSAP Book Prize for Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2009). The prize recognizes the best scholarly monograph on American periodicals published in the past three years. It is sponsored by database developer/vendor EBSCOhost and a national scholarly group, the Research Society for American Periodicals. The prize includes a plaque and a cash award that allowed Gardner to attend the presentation ceremony at the American Literature Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco this past weekend, which yours truly also attended as president of The John Updike Society. Gardner’s book was chosen by a panel of three noted scholars who cited the book for being “thoroughly researched, lucidly theorized, and engagingly written,” and called it “a masterful piece of recovery” that “expands the landscape of African American literary production.”