A List
11/10/03

SLU PROFESSOR THACKER RECEIVES AWARD FROM WLA

CANTON – St. Lawrence University Professor of Canadian Studies and Molson 
Research Fellow Robert W. Thacker has received the 2003 Edith and Delbert 
Wylder Award from the Western Literature Association (WLA), at its annual 
conference held recently in Houston, Texas. Instituted in 1993 and named 
for a WLA president and two founding members of the association, this 
award goes to a longtime member for contributions to the association.
	Thacker has served on the WLA's Executive Committee, serving as 
vice-president, president-elect, president and past-president; since 1999, 
he has been executive secretary and treasurer of the association. The WLA 
has approximately 650 members and publishes the quarterly journal Western 
American Literature.
      A faculty member at St. Lawrence since 1983, Thacker is a graduate 
of Bowling Green State University, with a master's degree from the 
University of Waterloo and the Ph.D. from the University of Manitoba. He 
is an expert on Canadian culture, especially literature, and has written 
extensively on the work of Alice Munro, Willa Cather and the North American 
literary west, and is the former editor of The American Review of Canadian 
Studies. 
	Thacker is the editor of The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on 
Alice Munro (1999) and is currently at work on Alice Munro: Writing Her 
Lives, an extended literary biography focused on Munro, her fiction and 
her career. It is for this project that he was awarded the Molson Research 
Fellowship earlier this year. Thacker has also been awarded a grant from 
the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C. to support research on the Munro 
biography.

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