November 15, 2002

La Salle University's Justin Cronin Receives Third Major
Award Since Publication of his Novel, Mary and O'Neil

Justin Cronin, a writer and English professor at La Salle University, keeps racking up awards. Cronin recently won the 2002 Whiting Writer's Award, a $35,000 prize given annually to ten artists and writers, for his novel, Mary and O'Neil, his third major prize for the work.

Last spring, Cronin received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for best debut work of fiction and the Stephen Crane Prize from Book of the Month Club. He also received a 2001 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, based on an excerpt from the book.

Cronin takes his success in stride. "It gives me a good launching pad for my next book," he says. "But it's also a wonderful feeling to have my work recognized by writers I admire. That's the greatest compliment of all."

Mary and O'Neil is a collection of eight interconnected short stories that primarily follow the life of O'Neil Burke from his parents' death in a car accident when he was a teenager to his graduation from college to his sister's battle with cancer. Several of the stories are devoted to Mary, who meets O'Neil at a Philadelphia area high school where they both work as teachers.

Upon its publication, Mary and O'Neil received laudatory reviews in papers across the country. Critic and writer Sylvia Brownrigg in The New York Times Book Review described it as "an array of graceful and reflective stories that illuminate the painful and the ordinary in its characters' lives."
While there are similarities between Cronin's life and the events in O'Neil's life, he says the character is not based on him.

"Certain events in the book are based on experiences I've had. For instance, just like O'Neil, I have an autistic nephew. But on the whole, O'Neil is a much better citizen than I am," he says.

Cronin's second novel, The Summer Guest, will be published by The Dial Press in May 2004. "It's a complicated story about an old man who goes to a Maine fishing camp to die," he says. "It's written in four different points of view, and the story actually goes back to the Italian campaign of the Second World War."

A graduate of Harvard University, Cronin obtained an MFA at the University of Iowa's well-known program for creative writing. His shorter work has appeared in such publications such as Food and Wine, Five Points, Greensboro Review, and the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine. His novella, A Short History of the Long Ball, was published in 1990 by Council Oak, receiving the National Novella Award.

Cronin has been teaching creative writing and literature since 1992. He lives in the Mount Airy section of Philadelphia with his wife Leslie and daughter Iris.

By Katie Esposito