D.L. Birchfield, a visiting lecturer in the American Indian Program at Cornell, has won the 1997 Louis Littlecoon Oliver Memorial Prose Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, an association of American Indian novelists, poets, and playwrights.

Birchfield won in the North American Native Authors First Book Awards competition for "The Oklahoma Basic Intelligence Test, and Other New and Collected Elementary, Epistolary, Autobiographical, and Oratorical Choctologies, "a book-length manuscript collection of essays, short stories and creative nonfiction that includes literary criticism, Choctaw history, environmental issues, treaty rights, Oklahoma history and other topics.

Birchfield received the award at the annual awards banquet of the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas on May 3 at the University of Oklahoma. His manuscript will be published in 1998 by the Greenfield Review Press of New York in its Frank Waters Memorial Series.

The annual North American Native Authors First Book Awards competition is open to Native authors who have not published a full-length book for adults. Birchfield has published five children's books and has edited and written for Native periodicals for many years.

The publication prize competition was inaugurated in 1992, when the Native Writers' Circle was founded at a gathering of more than 400 Native American literary writers at a conference at the University of Oklahoma. Publication of Birchfield's manuscript is supported by a grant from the Bay Foundation; he also will receive a royalty contract and cash prize.

A member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Birchfield has a law degree from the University of Oklahoma. He has been a writer and editor for 20 years, publishing mostly in Native American periodicals and anthologies, including an anthology of contemporary Native American poetry, Durable Breath, and the 11-volume Encyclopedia of North American Indians.

Birchfield has taught workshops for Native American writers on college and university campuses throughout the country. In June he will be a featured speaker at the 23rd annual convention of Wyoming Writers and at the 44th annual convention of Western Writers of America. He is a member of the Native American Journalists Association and in 1988 he won a national award from the Chess Journalists of America.

He also is one of seven Cornell faculty to win a university-wide faculty paper proposal competition sponsored by the Cornell Faculty Service-Learning Group, which carries a $2,000 cash award. The paper will be included in an anthology of essays about service learning by Cornell faculty.

Birchfield's Cornell appointment has been extended for one year, and in 1997-98 he will supplement his teaching as a Cornell Faculty Fellow for Akwe:kon, Cornell's American Indian Program House.