Pritchard, Sara 1949- (Delta B. Horne)

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Pritchard, Sara 1949- (Delta B. Horne)

PERSONAL:

Born 1949; married Kevin Oderman (an author and educator). Education: West Virginia University, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Morgantown, WV. Office—West Virginia University Press, P.O. Box 6295, Morgantown, WV, 26506. Agent—Jenny Bent, Trident Media Group, 41 Madison Ave., 36th Fl., New York, New York 10010. E-mail—[email protected]; [email protected].

CAREER:

Writer. West Virginia University Press, Morgantown, WV, public relations specialist, 2006—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Artist fellowship, West Virginia Commission on the Arts; Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prize in fiction, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 2002, and New York Times Notable Book selection, 2003, both for Crackpots.

WRITINGS:

Crackpots (novel), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2003.

Lately (short stories), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2007.

Contributor of stories and essays, under pseudonym Delta B. Horne, to periodicals, including Arts & Letters, Bellingham Review, Chattahoochee Review, and Northwest Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

Sara Pritchard is the author of Crackpots, winner of the Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for fiction, as well Lately, a critically acclaimed volume of short stories. She has also published essays and stories under the pseudonym Delta B. Horne. "I have always made things up," Pritchard told Artworks interviewer Colleen Anderson. "Even in telling something simple, I can't tell it the same way twice. Telling is an opportunity for improvement, and I think it's only natural to embellish and color."

A series of interconnected vignettes, Crackpots tells the story of Ruby Reese, a thrice-divorced Pennsylvania woman, and her eccentric family and friends. "Some readers may find Pritchard's moves between the first, second and third person affected, but the dialogue is tight and the observations lyrical," noted a critic in Publishers Weekly. New York Times reviewer Craig Seligman called the prose "dazzling," adding that "Pritchard allows the pathos—and there's a lot of it—to rise out of her sentences like a scent. You discover it instead of being pounded by it. The author's work has gone into constructing sentences that would contain, not sell, the emotion behind them, and she's in love with a whole range of feelings."

In Lately, a collection of eleven linked tales, Pritchard "examines the quirky lives of a handful of people whose paths intersect over several decades," noted Library Journal contributor Beth E. Andersen. The character of Celeste, for instance, first seen after a car accident in "A Winter's Tale," resurfaces in "The Christening" through the eyes of her elderly mother. Writing in Entertainment Weekly, Karen Karbo described the stories as "dense with flavor and beautifully wrought." "While exploring issues of self- and reinvention, of rootedness and disconnection," noted a critic in Kirkus Reviews, "Pritchard brings her characters deeply and movingly to life."