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 family, 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, and, on a craps game, he met Allene Pierce, who became his wife in 1988 He 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." Meanwhile as a teacher Tony worked with his friend and colleague Bill Marx to establish Theater Now and then the Arts Now program, an initiative that encourages faculty to bring students together outside of the classroom to engage with the arts. For this work Tony and Bill won the 2013 Award for Distinction in First-Year Undergraduate Education. Dozen of Arts Now courses have run in the past eight years, with classes on Jazz, Poetry, and Theater scheduled for the coming semester. When he wasn't writing or teaching or being a wonderfully supportive colleague, Tony loved bicycling and the beach, animals, nature. Music, too: he was fond of saying that "the tragedy of my life is that I am not a jazz guitarist." Here's how he ended an Artfuse piece about a performance by the saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders: He thanked us and left the stage and never came back. Standing ovation of course it goes without saying. Thanked us and left the stage and meant it like he'd meant everything else. No mistaking what he said for something else. No mistaking any of this. There was no mistaking Tony Wallace for anyone else. Friends may call Tuesday, May 22 from 4 to 8pm at Bell-O'Dea Funeral Home, 376 Washington Street, Brookline. Funeral Mass will be held at 10:00 am on Wednesday at St. Mary of the Assumption Church, 5 Linden Place, Brookline. In lieu of flowers and to honor Tony's legacy at the College of Arts and Sciences, the family has designated the Boston University CAS Writing Program for memorial contributions.