San Francisco Chronicle, CA
Dec 4 2004

OAKLAND
Mills staff members win writing awards
Meredith May

Creative writing got a double boost at Mills College this week when
two faculty members snagged two of the country’s most prestigious
fiction writing awards.

Victor LaValle is one of six poets and fiction writers to receive the
New York-based Whiting Writers’ Award. Micheline Aharonian Marcom was
one of five writers nationwide chosen for the Lannan Literary
Fellowship in New Mexico.

LaValle, author of “The Ecstatic” and “slapboxing with jesus:
stories,” was feted in a ceremony at the New York Public Library and
received $35,000. His award puts him in the same club as former
Whiting winners Jeffrey Eugenides and Tony Kushner — both of whom
also won the Pulitzer Prize.

Mills visiting writer Marcom won a $70,000 fellowship to continue
working on her trilogy, which is already drawing widespread acclaim.
Her first book, “Three Apples Fell from Heaven,” is set in Turkey in
1915 and depicts the Ottoman government’s genocide of Armenians. Her
work was named one of the year’s best books by both the Washington
Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Her second book, “The Daydreaming Boy,” centers on a haunted
middle-age survivor of Turkey’s Armenian massacres living in 1960’s
Beirut. She is working on the third novel.

Marcom earned her master’s degree in creative writing from Mills in
1999. LaValle is a 1998 graduate of the master’s fiction program at
Columbia University.