Anthony Wallace

Anthony Wallace passed away suddenly on May 16, 2018 at age 61. A Master Lecturer in the College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program at Boston University, Tony was an award-winning writer and gifted teacher who will be greatly missed by colleagues, friends, students, readers, and his beloved wife of 30 years, Allene Wallace. Born in Philadelphia in 1957, Tony attended St. Joseph’s Preparatory School and Lafayette College, where he earned a BA in English. In 1980, he went to Atlantic City to work in a casino. He met Allene Pierce when they were both dealing craps, and she became his wife in 1988. Tony worked at Bally’s Park Place casino for almost twenty years, dealing craps, roulette, and blackjack and working in a supervisory position as a pit boss—until one day, as he put it, he couldn't push himself through the door, and he decided to devote his life to his true calling, writing. Shortly after earning a Master's degree in Creative Writing at BU in 1999, Tony started teaching in BU's CAS Writing Program and continued to work on his fiction, much of it set in the casino world he'd left behind, and conveyed with a voice that his teacher Leslie Epstein called “daring, unflinching and with an almost Dostoyevskian intensity and sympathy.” His story "The Old Priest" won a Pushcart Prize in 2013, and a collection of the same title won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize that same year; in 2014 the book was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction. His subsequent work continued to win recognition—most recently a 2018 Pushcart for his short story "The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction."