Congratulations to Kevin Haworth

Warm congratulations to Kevin Haworth, who recently won the Lawrence Foundation Prize, an annual $1,000 award by the editorial board of Michigan Quarterly Review to the author of the "best short story" published in the journal that year. Kevin's winning story, "The Scribe," appeared in the fall 2009 issue. "The Scribe" features as its narrator-protagonist a self-described "sofer, a writer of the sacred letters of the Torah," and the travails of his job.

As you may recall, Kevin is a past winner of the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers. In 2006, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kevin about that prize and his novel, The Discontinuity of Small Things.

MQR is by no means a specifically "Jewish" literary journal, which reminds us of an important point I brought up about a year ago at the Jewish Fiction Writers' Conference: As wonderful and welcoming as Jewish-focused publications can be, writing on Jewish subjects can be placed in many different venues.