Lisa VanAuken Receives Alumni Professional Achievement Award from McDaniel College

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Lisa VanAuken credit: McDaniel College

WESTMINSTER, MD (10/25/2013)(readMedia)-- Lisa VanAuken of Rutherford, N.J., has received the alumni professional achievement award from McDaniel College. She is a 2002 alumna of the college.

Presented annually during McDaniel's Homecoming, the alumni professional achievement award is presented to a graduate who has gained distinction in his/her chosen field or profession and whose accomplishments reflect admirably on McDaniel College.

VanAuken is the author of numerous short stories, essays and poems. Her first four novels were primarily romances published under the pen name Lisa Dale with Penguin and Hatchette, with subsequent rights granted for translation in Norway, Sweden, Germany, Poland and Romania. Her mainstream novel "The Wishing Thread" was published by Ballantine (Random House) in August 2013 under her new pen name Lisa Van Allen, with simultaneous publication from Aufhau in Germany. A sixth book is on its way.

She has been a nominee for Best New American Voices and the Pushcart Prize, as well as a former assistant editor of The Literary Review journal. Her writing has appeared in many magazines, such as Fourth Genre, Flyway, Fugue, Sou'wester, The Southeast Review, as well as online on the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog and Fodor's.

After graduating from McDaniel, she worked at a literary agency before returning to school for her M.F.A. in creative writing from Fairleigh Dickinson University.

For more information about McDaniel College, visit www.mcdaniel.edu.

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McDaniel College, recognized nationally among "40 Colleges that Change Lives" and U.S. News top-tier liberal arts colleges, is a four-year private college of the liberal arts and sciences offering more than 70 undergraduate programs of study, including dual and student-designed majors, plus 25 highly regarded graduate programs. Its hallmark faculty-student collaborations in research, teaching and mentoring plus hundreds of leadership and service opportunities enrich a lively learning experience that is rooted in a personalized interdisciplinary and global curriculum. Innovative January courses take students to points all over the world while McDaniel's degree-granting European campus offers a unique opportunity for international study at the only American university in Budapest, Hungary. A diverse and close-knit community of 1,600 undergraduates and 1,560 part-time graduate students, McDaniel also boasts a spectacular 160-acre hilltop campus in Westminster, Md., an hour or less from Baltimore, D.C., the Chesapeake Bay, an Amtrak station and BWI international airport.