Brad Vice

Brad Vice (born November 14, 1973) is an English language and composition professor at the University of West Bohemia. He grew up in Alabama. He is notable for an academic scandal within the Southern literary community. His short story collection The Bear Bryant Funeral Train won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction from the University of Georgia Press, but the award was later rescinded and the book recalled after portions of the story were found to be plagiarized from an earlier work by Carl Carmer.

Biography

Vice was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in 1973 and raised in nearby Northport. Vice's father, Leon Vice, was a high school history teacher and a farmer while his mother Dorothy was a radiology technician.

He received his masters degree from the University of Tennessee and Ph.D. from The University of Cincinnati. During a brief stint working at Mississippi State University as a professor, Vice published his doctoral thesis as a standalone work. Shortly after it won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, a librarian at the Tuscaloosa Public Library noted that "plot, language and even the title of his first short story" had been lifted from a story by Carl Carmer titled "Stars Fell on Alabama". Vice lost his job at Mississippi State, as well as his award from the University of Georgia, and his Ph.D. from Cincinnati was called into question.