Georgia Southern University to Award Harbuck Scholarship
Georgia Southern University will welcome nationally renowned novelist Katharine Weber to campus Thursday, Sept. 8 as she presents the Brittany “Ally” Harbuck Scholarship.
This year’s Harbuck Scholarship winner is Axel Wright of Baxley, Ga. Wright was selected by Weber for the award.
“Axel Wright has an uncommon gift for the understated, precisely right turn of phrase that marks a mood or a moment,” said Weber. “His fiction is poetic, and his poetry hints at worlds within worlds. There is a deftness in his words and images that few new writers can claim. His voice is intriguing and surprising. Mark Twain said ‘The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.’ Axel Wright delivers the lightning.”
Weber will present the award at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 8 in room 1005 in Georgia Southern’s College of Information Technology Building.
Wright is the third recipient of the Harbuck scholarship, which supports Writing and Linguistics majors who are rising sophomores, juniors, or seniors with at least a 3.0 GPA in their Writing and Linguistics courses. The award is endowed by David and Debi Harbuck of Savannah to honor their daughter — nicknamed Ally — who died in a traffic accident in April 2005. At the time, Ally was finishing her freshman year at Georgia Southern. She was a creative writing major, wrote for the student newspaper and was active in several campus organizations.
Along with Wright, other nominees who will read their creative pieces at the awards ceremony include Writing and Linguistics majors Julie Collins, Christopher Combs, Sarah Fonseca, and Matt Lane.
This year’s judge, Katharine Weber, has published five novels and is a personal friend of Debi Harbuck’s. Weber’s memoir, The Memory of All That: George Gershwin, Kay Swift, and My Family’s Legacy of Infidelities, was released in July by Crown Publishers, a division of Random House. Her novels include Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Triangle, True Confections, The Little Women, and The Music Lesson.
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