Blais to be Presented Samuel Minot Jones Award for Literary Achievement

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Pulitzer Prize winning journalism professor Madeleine Blais has been named a recipient of the fifth annual Samuel Minot Jones Award for Literary Achievement awarded by the Town of Amherst’s Jones Library.

The award will be presented during the “Sammys” fundraising gala on Thursday, April 26 at 6 p.m. at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.

The Sammys is Amherst’s signature event honoring the community's remarkable and vibrant literary heritage.

The Amherst Regional High School Theater Program, currently led by John Bechtold, will also receive an award.

Blais, a member of the UMass Amherst faculty since 1987, won the Pulitzer in 1980 for “Zepp’s Last Stand,” an account of an 83-year-old World War I veteran’s bid to secure an honorable discharge from the Army decades after he was dishonorably discharged and jailed for failing to obey an order.

Her books include “In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle” (1995), which told the story of a remarkable season for the Amherst Regional High School girls basketball team. The book was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in nonfiction and named one of the Top 100 sports books of the 20th Century by ESPN.

A Nieman Fellow in 1986, Blais has been a reporter for the Boston Globe, the Trenton Times, and Tropic Magazine of the Miami Herald. She has written for the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Northeast Magazine in the Hartford Courant, Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, Detroit Free Press and San Jose Mercury News.

The Sammys gala will begin in the Mead galleries with hors d'oeuvres, beer and wine from local breweries/vineyards, a signature cocktail, and live music. The awards ceremony will be held next door in Stirn Auditorium.

All proceeds will be used to support library collections, purchasing materials in all formats and for all ages.

For more information or to purchase tickets online, visit www.joneslibrary.org/sammys

Tickets are offered at $60, $100, $150, and $200.