CANTON - St. Lawrence University Associate Professor of English Pedro Ponce has been awarded a Creative Fellowship in Prose by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The award, for $25,000, is one of only 40 granted, from a field of 1,179 applications.

Designed to give writers the time and freedom to pursue their work, the creative writing fellowships went to writers in 20 states and the District of Columbia.

Ponce's fiction has been published widely and he has won numerous awards for his writing. A graduate of Williams College, he holds an M.A. from The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and an M.F.A. from Western Michigan University. He teaches courses in fiction writing and 20th-Century American literature and his research interests include narrative theory and theories of genre.