A College of Charleston assistant professor has received a literary prize for her short story collection.

Malinda McCollum, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English, recently received a Juniper Literary Prize for Fiction for her short story collection The Surprising Places: Stories.

The prizes are awarded yearly by the University of Massachusetts Press and the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program and recognize both poets and fiction writers. Each winner  — this year there were two for fiction and two for poetry — receives $1,000 and the publication of his or her work.

McCollum’s short stories have appeared in The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, Epoch, Zyzzyva and elsewhere. They have also been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XXVIII, The Worst Years of Your Life and The Paris Review Book of People with Problems.

She has also been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Plimpton Prize for Fiction, and a Wallace Stegner/John L’Heureux Fellowship from the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University.

She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught at Stanford University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Iowa. She began teaching at the College in 2005.