Fiction. HYMN OF ASH by George Looney is the winner of the 2007 Elixir Press Chapbook Award for fiction. This stunning novella traces, through the skillful layering of stories, a family history born from sin and destined for fire. Brian Everson said "...this is a haunting and dark history in which the Word is made not flesh but worm, and where the sins of the past begin to whisper more and more insistently to the present." George Looney's previous books include The Precious Rhetoric of Angels and Attendant Ghosts: Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh.

George Looney has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for his poetry, as well as two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships and, most recently, a $10,000 fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for 2006. Looney is the author of Animals Housed in the Pleasure of the Flesh (winner of the 1995 Bluestem award), Attendant Ghosts (Cleveland State UP, 2000), and most recently, a chapbook of Greatest Hits (Pudding House Press, 2001). He has also published a novella, Hymn of Ash, which won the Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award and was published by Elixir Press in 2008. Another collection of poetry, Open Between Us, will be published by WordTech Communications early in 2010 on their Turning Point imprint. Looney currently directs the Creative Writing Program at Penn State Eerie. [2008]