The winner of the 2008 Elliott White Springs Prize for Fiction Contest was named on Tuesday, April 22, during the annual Friends of Medford Library meeting. The guest speaker was Dr. Patrick Scott, Director of Special Collections at USC Columbia, who presented an illustrated lecture about Lewis and Clark.

Nancy Reeves from Great Falls, South Carolina, was the winner of the contest and was awarded $500 cash for her short story "CousinJohnny". She is a freshman at USC Lancaster and plans to attend USC Columbia and to major in Journalism.  

Lynn Kostoff, associate professor of English at Francis Marion University, judged the contest. He had this to say about Nancy's work, "At its best, the story maintained the difficult balance between the demands of character-driven and plot-driven fiction, and it was this element in the end that distinguished "CousinJohnny" from the other finalists for the prize." Kostoff earned the B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees in creative writing from Bowling Green State University. Before joining Francis Marion University faculty in 1985, the Ohio native taught at Indiana State University and at the University of Alabama.