An award-winning author has won one of West Virginia Universitys premier teaching honors for nurturing the next generation of creative writers.

Gail Galloway Adams, an associate professor of English, is the recipient of the 2005 Harless Award for Exceptional Teaching.

I am honored to receive this award dedicated to excellence in teaching,Adams said.Using stories, my own and others, has helped me learn that I want my teaching to be a circle of people asking questions and trying to find answers through imagination and vision.

I hope my students understand that what they write carries with it responsibility,she added.I want them to learn that their words matter. I want them to know and believe that their stories will be part of the collective memory of our world.

Adams joined the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences in 1985. Besides creative writing, she teaches courses in American literature and composition.

She is the author ofThe Purchase of Order,a collection of short stories that won the Flannery OConnor Award for Short Fiction in 1985. The title story was selected for the Prentice Hall Anthology of Womens Literature.

More than 25 of her stories have also appeared in numerous literary journals, including Story Quarterly, The Georgia Review, North American Review, Gulf Coast and The Sycamore Review andmost recentlyThe Kenyon Review.

As a teacher, Adams is an energetic conversationalist and sympathetic listener, colleagues and former students said in letters supporting her nomination for the award.

Gail Adamsenthusiasm for teaching, for learning, for writing, for conversation, for all parts that comprise a teaching life, is positively contagious,said Laura Brady, director of the WVU Center for Writing Excellence.She makes her students want to learn more and her colleagues want to teach better.

Sandi Ward, who obtained her masters degree in fine arts in English last year, noted that Adams makes all of her students feel their voice is important.

She always solicits that voice, tooencouraging the less bold members of the class to voice their opinions or coaxing the voice from a piece of writing when it may falter,she added.

The Harless award is the latest teaching honor in Adams30-year career. She was named West Virginia Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education in 1994. She has also been the recipient of Outstanding Teacher awards from the Eberly College, Department of English and South Atlantic Association of Departments of English.

Adamseducational background and teaching experience are multifaceted. She earned a bachelors degree in drama and a masters degree in American civilization from the University of Texas and pursued a doctorate in American studies at Emory University. Before coming to WVU , she was a dance teacher at Hampton University, American studies instructor at Emory University and Rhodes College and the McGee Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College.

She has also conducted writing workshops at the Wildacres Summer Writers Conference in North Carolina since 1988.

Whether its the literal hands-on experience of my dancing years, the formal lectures of my history years, or my current classes and workshops that are centered around stories, all these teaching approaches helped me learn, and I now hope theyll help my students learn how to read, how to write, perhaps even how to live a life,she said.

She lives in Morgantown with her husband, Timothy Dow Adams, chairman of the Department of English.

The Harless Award for Exceptional Teaching is named for JamesBuckHarless, a Mingo County coal executive and a long-time supporter of WVU . The $5,000 award is made possible through support from Gene Budig, WVU s 17 th president, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.