Wayne Greenhaw (photo: Patrice Wynne)

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Wayne Greenhaw, author, prize-winning journalist and Nieman Fellow, will receive the Clarence Cason Award for Nonfiction Writing March 17 at a banquet in his honor at the Sheraton Four Points Hotel on The University of Alabama campus.

The UA journalism department established the Cason Award to honor exemplary nonfiction over a long career. Winners must be distinguished writers and have a connection to Alabama and the South. The award carries a cash prize of $3,000.

“The Cason Award is the journalism department’s most important annual event,” said Dr. Ed Mullins, immediate past chairman of the journalism department and member of the selection committee. “But the award is a University of Alabama award, not just recognition by the journalism department. The event brings together the journalism, literary and arts community of the South once a year to celebrate great writing.”

The public is invited. Tickets are $50. The event will begin with a 6 p.m. reception, followed by dinner, the awards program and Greenhaw’s address. For more information, or to order tickets, call 205/348-4787.

Last year’s winners were Rick Bragg, best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, and the late Bailey Thomson, a journalist and UA journalism professor who first proposed the Cason Award and developed it into one of the nation’s most important awards for nonfiction.

Other Cason Award winners are best-selling literary journalist Gay Talese (1998), famed biologist and two time Pulitzer Prize winner Edward O. Wilson (1999), former New York Times editor and Pulitzer Prize winner Howell Raines (2000), jazz critic, novelist and memoirist Albert Murray (2001), Auburn historian and social critic Wayne Flynt (2002) and Pulitzer Prize winning author Diane McWhorter (2003).

“This is the eighth year of the award, and Wayne Greenhaw and his body of work fit the criteria perfectly: great writing, important issues, Southern quality,” Mullins said.