Angela Garcia, anthropology assistant professor, has received the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award for University of California Exceptional First Book. Garcia, author of The Pastoral Clinic: Addiction and Dispossession along the Rio Grande, is a medical anthropologist who studies heroin addiction among rural residents in New Mexico's Española Valley.

PEN USA is the West Coast center for the renowned writers' organization International PEN and honors outstanding work by writers in 10 separate genres. The awards will be presented at the organization's 20th Annual Literary Awards Festival, known as LitFest, on Nov. 17 at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Past winners of awards from PEN USA include Alice Walker and Gore Vidal.

Garcia's prior work on drug addiction in New Mexico earned her the Stirling Prize for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology, awarded by the Society for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, in 2009.