The Association of College English Teachers of Alabama solicits nominations for the 2023 Eugene CurrentGarcia Award for Distinction in Literary Scholarship. This award is made annually to a living, outstanding literary scholar who is from Alabama or has worked primarily in Alabama or has focused mainly on Alabama writers. This year will mark ACETA’s 25th annual conferrence of this prestigious award.

As originally conceived, the award “recognizes and rewards Alabamians who have distinguished themselves as men or women of letters, specifically in scholarly reflection and writing on literary topics.” It also demonstrates “the respect of the scholar’s peers in the academic community and signals to the citizenry at large the lasting importance of the pursuit of knowledge and the contribution of literature to the culture.” The award includes a $2,500 honorarium and an ACETA recognition plaque.

Winners of the Eugene Current-Garcia award are the featured keynote speakers at the ACETA annual conference the year following their award. A nomination must include a curriculum vita reflecting the course of the nominee’s scholarly career, a detailed bibliography of the nominee’s scholarly productions, and a cover letter clarifying and supporting the nominee’s qualifications for the award. Nominations may contain other letters of support from recognized scholars in the nominee’s field; they should not contain copies of actual publications. Visit the ACETA website Conference link directly at https://tinyurl.com/muatwzr2 to upload entry, or navigate from ACETA website (library.jeffersonstate.edu/ACETA) to ACETA Conference link on left-hand side, and then scroll down to choose nomination category to upload entry.

ACETA’s steering committee will review all nominations and select a winner, whose name will be announced at the 2023 ACETA Conference at Jefferson State Community College in Clanton. All nominations and all committee deliberations are confidential. The award is named for the late Dr. Eugene Current-Garcia, who, in a distinguished academic career spanning five decades, mostly at Auburn University, published six books and dozens of articles and reviews on the short story genre and Old Southwest humor, and founded and co-edited the Southern Humanities Review.

Previous winners of the Eugene Current-Garcia Award include Claudia Durst Johnson (1998), Philip Beidler (1999), Don Noble (2000), Bert Hitchcock (2001), Trudier Harris (2002), William Hutchings (2003), Benjamin B. Williams (2004), Robert W. Halli, Jr. (2005), Nancy Grisham Anderson (2006), Elaine W. Hughes (2007), Norman McMillan (2008), John H. Hafner (2009), Ralph Voss (2010), David Sauer (2011), Bill Ulmer (2012), Sue Walker (2013), Wayne Flynt (2014), Eric Sterling (2015), Frye Gaillard (2016), Kirk Curnutt (2017), David Cowart (2018), Chris Metress (2019), Robert Evans (2020), Alan Gribben (2021), and Heather White (2022).