Award-winning poet and nonfiction author Jennifer Horne, a native of Little Rock, Ark., will receive Troy University’s Hall-Waters Prize on April 25.

Horne, who served as the Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2017 to 2021, will read selections from her recent biography, “Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author” (2023), and her poetry at 9:30 a.m. in the Lamar P. Higgins Ballrooms in the Trojan Center on the Troy Campus. Admission is free and open to the public.

Endowed by the late Dr. Wade Hall, a Bullock County native and TROY alumnus, in memory of his parents Wade Hall, Sr. and Sarah Elizabeth Waters, the award is presented regularly to a person who has made significant contributions to Southern heritage and culture in history, literature or the arts. Dr. Wade Hall was an author, former member of the faculty at the University of Florida and professor emeritus of English at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. 

Past winners of the award include Rep. John Lewis, Bobbie Ann Mason, Pat Conroy, Natasha Trethewey, Cassandra King, Ace Atkins, the songwriting team of Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham and Patricia Foster, among others. A complete history of the award is available on the Hall-Waters Prize webpage.

“Jennifer Horne is such an integral part of the Southern literary scene that it is easy to take her presence for granted,” said Dr. Kirk Curnutt, chair of the English Department at Troy University. ‘Odyssey of a Wandering Mind’ is really a culmination of more than three decades of toiling in the fields with expecting much attention. Yet Jennifer is dedicated to narrating the entire spectrum of women’s experiences, including subjects like aging and spirituality that don’t necessarily razzle-dazzle us because they’re so internal and personal. She has a keen eye for capturing people’s contradictions, though, allowing us to see them in their complexity.”

“Odyssey of a Wandering Mind,” tells the story of Sara Mayfield (1905-1979), a childhood friend of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald whose 1971 biography, “Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald,” was unfairly maligned as a hack job on F. Scott Fitzgerald when it was published. As Horne documents, Mayfield was so much more than a friend, she was also a novelist, journalist, inventor and small-business owner. Like Zelda, she also spent a significant portion of her life in treatment at a mental health facility, in her case Bryce Hospital in Tuscaloosa.

Horne is the author of several previous novels and poetry collections, including “Bottle Tree, Little Wanderer,” and “Borrowed Light,” as well as her short story collection “Tell the World You’re a Wildflower.” Additionally, she has edited and co-edited several volumes of poetry, including “Root & Plant & Bloom: Poems by Dodie Walton Horne.” She is the recipient of the Tuscaloosa Arts Council’s Druid City Literary Arts Award and was named the Poet of the Year by the Alabama State Poetry Society in 2021. 

For the fourth straight year, students in Dr. Curnutt’s English 4495 senior seminar class have organized the Hall-Waters ceremony, from picking the menu, writing the award citation and publicizing the event.

“This year students have a great opportunity while celebrating our awardee to learn about how biographies are written,” said Dr. Curnutt. “The road to publication for ‘Odyssey’ was neither easy nor certain, so Horne’s experience with writing and revision will be a great lesson in persistence.”