Ann Pancake
Biographical Information
2000 winner of the Kathleen Bakeless Nason Literary Prize in Fiction, Ann Pancake was born in Richmond, but raised in Romney, West Virginia. She attended West Virginia University, earning a B. A. in English summa cum laude in 1985. She spent the next several years traveling the world, teaching English to non-native speakers, working in Japan, American Samoa, and Thailand. She returned to the United States, completing an M. A. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. Pancake continued her education at the University of Washington at Seattle, earning her Ph.D. in 1998. Since then, she has been an assistant professor of literature and creative writing at Behrend College, Pennsylvania State University-Erie. Pancake also served as director of the Smith Reading Series from 1999-2000.Pancake has published one fiction collection, Given Ground, for which she received the 2000 Bakeless Literary Prize for Fiction. Her work has also appeared in various periodical publications such as the Mid-American Review, Glimmer Train, and the Journal of Appalachian Studies. Pieces of her work have also been anthologized, including appearing in Best of Wind (Cope and Hughes, eds.) and Lessons on the Road (Diana Renn, ed). In addition to her teaching responsibilities, she also conducts fiction readings and writing workshops.
Ann Pancake can be contacted at:
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Behrend College
Pennsylvania State University-Erie
Station Rd.
Erie, PA 16428
Critical Responses
Ann Pancake once commented that "I consider myself very fortunate to have grown up in this state because I think few environments in late 20th-century America provided a better writer's education. West Virginia's storytelling traditions, its rich language, and its bone-deep sense of place all shaped me as a writer and all deeply inform my book." And critics have certainly agreed with her assessment of the importance of West Virginia, the place, the spirit, and the people, in her award-winning fiction collection, Given Ground. Commenting on Given Ground, David Bradley, one of the Bakeless Prize judges, remarked that Given Ground is "an astoundingly rich rendering of one of America's most caricatured and most poorly understood heartlands." Writing in Appalachian Life, Elizabeth Gordon makes a similar remark - "Ann Pancake stakes her territory-the hills of West Virginia-and in a mere dozen stories manages to illuminate the often dark existence of a particular land and people, each bearing the imprint of the other."
Works Published
Given Ground
Selected Bibliography
Gordon, Elizabeth. Given Ground (book review). Appalachian Life, August/September 2002. pp.38-39.
Judd, Elizabeth. Given Ground (book review). New York Times Book Review, August 12, 2001. pp. 22.
Wondolowski, Rupurt. Given Ground (book review). Baltimore City Paper, November 14, 2001.