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Colgate English professor William Henry Lewis’s collection of short stories — I Got Somebody in Staunton — was one of four finalists for the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the largest peer-juried prize for fiction in the United States.

The PEN-Faulkner Foundation announced on Wednesday that this year’s winner was E. L. Doctorow’s novel The March, — and that the three other finalists were Karen Fisher for A Sudden Country, James Salter for Last Night, and Bruce Wagner for The Chrysanthemum Palace.

The judges — George Garrett, Ana Menéndez, and Melissa Pritchard — considered more than 359 novels and short story collections by an American author published in the United States during the 2005 calendar year from more than 90 publishing houses, including small and academic presses.

I Got Somebody in Staunton (Amistad/Harper Collins) is a collection of 10 stories set in Bedford-Stuyvesant; Denver; and Staunton, Va., all deeply concerned with the pride and pain of African-American heritage.

In Lewis’s title story, a black college professor, haunted by his dying uncle Izell's memories of lynchings and the ways of the old South, flirts with danger by giving a ride to a flirtatious young white woman.

I Got Somebody in Staunton was named one of Kirkus Reviews top 25 books of 2005 and it received a Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary award. Lewis is also the author of In The Arms of Our Elders.

Now an associate professor at Colgate, Lewis previously taught at the University of Virginia, Denison University, Mary Washington College, Trinity College, and most recently, the College of the Bahamas and Centre College. He also taught elementary, junior, and senior high school students.

He has worked as a construction laborer, community organizer, journeyman dishwasher, museum security guard, delivery truck driver, record store clerk, jazz disc jockey and a coach for the Bahamas National Soccer Teams.

Lewis's nonfiction has appeared in Black Issues in Higher Education, Washington Post Book World and O magazine.

His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in America's top literary journals, including Ploughshares, New Letters, Colorado Review, Callaloo, African American Review, and Kenyon Review, and several anthologies.

Lewis and the four other authors will be honored during the 26th annual PEN/Faulkner Award ceremony on May 6 at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.  As the winner, Doctorow receives $15,000.  Lewis and the other finalists each receive $5,000.

Doctorow won the 1990 PEN/Faulkner Award for Billy Bathgate. His latest book, The March, begins after the burning of Atlanta and recounts Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s march of 60,000 Union soldiers, in 1864-65, through Georgia and the Carolinas.