English Professor’s Story Collection Wins Prestigious Prize

A story collection written by St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of English Pedro Ponce has won the Indiana Review's 2020 Don Belton Fiction Prize.

The Devil and the Dairy Princess will be published by Indiana University Press in trade paperback form in 2021 as part of their Blue Lights Book Series.

“I found The Devil and the Dairy Princess to be strikingly original,” said Charles Yu, a Taiwanese-American writer who served as the prize judge. “Each piece is distinctive, innovative, and full of fresh surprises. Yet the collection as a whole is cohesive in tone and voice, evocative, playful, haunting spaces both dreamy and nightmarish.”

Ponce writes, “The Devil and the Dairy Princess is about the power of storytelling—for better and for worse. The characters in this collection confront personal and communal fictions that help to make their lives meaningful. Some will decide to stick to their stories, even after they are exposed as fictions. Others will abandon old stories for the strangeness and wonder of stories yet to be told.”

Established in 2018, the prize honors award-winning fiction writer and teacher Don Belton. It is sponsored by Indiana Review and Indiana University Press, and encourages literary fiction submissions that have "an intelligent sense of language, assumes a degree of risk, and has consequence beyond the world of its narrators.”

Ponce’s research interests include narrative theory, conspiracy theory, and dystopian literature. At St. Lawrence, he regularly teaches Techniques of Fiction, Methods of Critical Analysis, and Advanced Fiction Writing.

Learn more about St. Lawrence’s Department of English.