Madison Smartt Bell, who earned his master of arts degree in creative writing from Hollins University, has won a prestigious $250,000 Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Distributed in $50,000 installments over five years, the award recognizes an author who demonstrates literary excellence and enables them to devote their time exclusively to writing.

Bell received his M.A. degree from Hollins in 1981 and since 1984 has taught at Goucher College in Baltimore, where he is currently professor of English and director of the Kratz Center for Creative Writing. (He will be on special leave during the award’s term.) He is the author of 12 novels, including The Washington Square Ensemble (1983), Waiting for the End of the World (1985), The Year of Silence (1987), Doctor Sleep (1991), Save Me, Joe Louis (1993), and Soldier’s Joy, which received the Lillian Smith Award for 1989. His book All Souls’ Rising was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award, and winner of the 1996 Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best book of the year dealing with matters of race. His most recent work is Toussaint Louverture: A Biography (2007), which explores the life of the first leader of free Haiti. Esquire, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review have published Bell’s writings over the past 25 years.

The Strauss Living Award is named for the late Harold Strauss, onetime editor-in-chief of Alfred A. Knopf, and this year’s award selection committee included the distinguished authors Russell Banks, Ann Beattie and Francine du Plessix Gray. The prize is the third esteemed literary honor won by a Hollins alumna/i in the past 12 months: Kiran Desai (M.A., 1994) was presented the National Book Critics Circle fiction award in March 2007, and  Natasha Trethewey (M.A., 1991) received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry the following month.