Coastal Carolina University professor Cara Blue Adams has won The Missouri Review's William Peden Prize for the best short story published in its literary magazine in the past year.

"The Sea Latch" was the winning story selected by judge Jessica Francis Kane, a highly awarded writer who lives in New York. The prize comes with a $1,000 award.

An assistant professor of creative writing at Coastal Carolina University, Adams is a former co-editor of The Southern Review. Her essays and short stories have appeared in journals such as Narrative, Epoch, Mississippi Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares and The Sun, among many others. She has been awarded The Kenyon Review Short Fiction Prize, together with scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

From Putney, Vt., Adams earned a bachelor's degree from Smith College and an MFA from the University of Arizona, where she also taught creative writing. As Interim Coordinator of Creative Writing, Adams directs Coastal Carolina's creative writing minor. She is also the editor of CCU's national literary journal, Waccamaw.