Ask John Updike (who's won it twice) or Toni Morrison (who won the Pulitzer five years before she was awarded the Nobel).

For Robert Olen Butler, Francis Eppes Professor in English at Florida State, the honor cemented his reputation as a writer fiercely dedicated to his craft.

Butler has written two volumes of short fiction and nine novels, including They Whisper (Holt, 1994), Tabloid Dreams (Holt, 1996), Mr. Spaceman (Grove, 2000), and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Holt, 1992), the collection that won him America's highest writing honor in 1993. He has also written screenplays for Hollywood's major studios, and his stories have been included in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories.

In May, Butler was awarded the National Fiction Award for his short story "Fair Warning," which was published in Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope: All Story. The story, which follows a female auctioneer in the world of high-dollar sales, is the basis for Butler's upcoming novel of the same name.

Who knows? Could be Butler's chance to draw even with Updike or to position himself for something even bigger. Still, it seems, there are more important things in life. In coming to Tallahassee to follow his passion, Butler has found a perfect match.

"I've spent 15 years teaching in dozens of major venues around the country," says Butler. "Nowhere outside of Florida State University have I found such a deep respect for the creative process and such a splendid collegiality among distinguished and inspired scholars and writers."

Professor of Biological Science Frances C. James

Gone are the days when the Southeastern coastal plain was blanketed by tall stands of longleaf pine, trees that once stretched from Virginia to Texas in nearly unrelieved profusion.

Comparatively little remains of this incredibly diverse ecosystem, home to hundreds of species of plants and animals, many found nowhere else on Earth.

Over the years, biologists have documented a dramatic decline of animal and plant life in the vanishing longleaf forests. What they have found says much about not only how nature works, but how we humans rationalize our treatment of the environment.

For the past decade, Frances James has been carefully following the plight of one species whose fate in Florida is inextricably tied to the state's remaining longleaf woodlands. An avian population ecologist, this year James is winding up an intensive, five-year study funded by the National Science Foundation of the largest remaining population of the red-cockaded woodpecker (Picoides borealis), a small bird that has been on the federal endangered species list since 1970.

Large numbers of red-cockaded woodpeckers once flitted about the Southland's vast longleaf and slash pine forests. Today, an estimated 10,000 of the birds remain, clinging to discrete family units in scattered woodlands, mostly in national forests and on military bases, that still contain some old (at least 70-year) trees, the bird's prime habitat.

James' "lab" is the 575,000-acre Apalachicola National Forest south of Tallahassee. The forest is still home to more red-cockaded woodpeckers than any other woodland in the South. But James and her students have found that the population is far more healthy in the forest's western tracts—by contrast, the bird's numbers nearer Tallahassee are in decline. An upcoming issue of Research in Review will explain the reasons behind this surprising discovery.