Salem State professor wins national writing award

SALEM – Salem State College English professor Perry Glasser has been named the grand prize winner of The Good Men Project National Writing Contest, the school has announced.Glasser, of Haverhill, will receive $1,000 and the honor of having his essay, Iowa Black Dirt, published in The Good Men Project anthology this November.The Good Men Foundation is a New York-based charitable group dedicated to helping organizations that provide educational, social, financial or legal support to men and boys at risk, such as the Boys and Girls Club.The Good Men Project is a collection of stories which highlights what it means to be a good man in America.As a way to make the project more diverse, the organization solicited essays from authors across the country, asking only that they carry a common theme: the essay must focus on a defining moment in his life that caused a fundamental change in his understanding of himself as a man.Iowa Black Dirt is the story of a man unexpectedly gaining full custody of his 8-year-old daughter and then embracing his role as a full-time single parent.Through unconditional love for his daughter, he learns what it means to be a father and what it means to be a good man.”This essay was first composed during a miserable year in Kansas when I lived in a borrowed furnished basement whose original residents, a cadre of crickets, resented my presence,” said Glasser. “Desperate to remember better times, I thought of my daughter and raising her as a single parent.”Glasser is the author of many short stories, which he has published in the award-winning collection Dangerous Places, which took home the 2008 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize from BkMk Press at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.He also published two prior collections of short fiction, Suspicious Origins and Singing on the Titanic, a book recorded by the Library of Congress.”The Good Men Project National Writing Contest is a platform for men to communicate through their experiences,” said Good Men Foundation Co-Founder Tom Matlack. “There is no more important question at this moment in history – with markets collapsing, corruption rampant, two foreign wars, environmental disaster at hand and the fabric of the American family disintegrating – than what it means to be a ‘good’ man.”