 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.Vice is currently serving as an instructor at the University of West Bohemia, in Pilsen, in the Czech Republic.