Southern Review Honors Griffith

Saul Bellow would have been proud to know he was once Michael Griffith’s “friend,” especially now that Griffith’s essay, “Jostling with the Actual: My Summer with Saul Bellow,” has been selected as the inaugural winner of

The Southern Review’s

Cleanth Brooks Prize in Nonfiction. In the essay Griffith recalls the summer after his freshman year of college when he worked in a German bank. Lonely and homesick on his first trip outside the United States, he began reading Bellow’s works, which he says became his “lifeline to home.”

This is not the first award for the author. He is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Last year he also won the English Department’s Boyce Award for Outstanding Teaching. His works,

Spikes: A Novel,

(2001) and

Bibliophilia: A Novella and Stories

(2003), were highly praised by critics.

Griffith’s work has appeared in

The Washington Post

,

Southwest Review

,

New England Quarterly Review

,

Virginia Quarterly Review

,

Southern Review

, and

Oxford American

, as well as several other periodicals.