Ben Campbell, an instructor of English at New River Community College, has recently received honors for his writing. He placed second in the Appalachian Heritage Writers Symposium fiction contest for a short story titled “The Split that Divides.” The award was presented on the campus of Southwest Virginia Community College.

Another short story, “Strike on the Meadow River,” was chosen by prize-winning author Ann Pancake for third place in Lincoln Memorial University’s Mountain Heritage Literary Festival. The same story is forthcoming in the anthology The Artist as Activist in Appalachia to be published this fall by the University Press of North Georgia.

Campbell is teaching a new Appalachian literature course at NRCC this fall. He says it is an exploration and celebration of writing in the Appalachian south.

“There’s a certain aesthetic Appalachian readers expect from writers in our region,” he adds. “The language is not just a dialect. There’s a cadence to the prose … writing that occurs almost like a song.”