We rarely accept one book at a time, so when we accepted three new books by one author you know something BIG is happening. This fall (2019) we’re releasing three new books by K.L. Cook Marrying Kind, a collection of stories; Lost Soliloquies, poems; and The Art of Disobedience, essays.
K. L. Cook is the author of three award-winning books of fiction. Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions), a collection of thematically linked stories, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was a Longlist Finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize. His novel, The Girl from Charnelle (William Morrow/Harper Perennial), won The Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and was named a Southwest Book of the Year, an Editor’s Choice selection from the Historical Novel Society, and was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Prize, among other honors. Cook’s first book, Last Call (Nebraska/Bison Books), a short story cycle chronicling three decades in the lives of a West Texas family, won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.
His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including Glimmer Train, One Story, Poets & Writers, Hotel Amerika, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Brevity, The Louisville Review, Shenandoah, Witness, American Short Fiction, Arts & Letters, Post Road, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, and Harvard Review.
His work has also been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories, The Prairie Schooner Book Prize: Tenth Anniversary Reader, Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, Now Write: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, When I Was a Loser: Essays on (Barely) Surviving High School, and Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education.
He has been the recipient of two grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and residency fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts.
He is an Associate Professor of English at Iowa State University, where he teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Environment Program. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program.
He previously was a Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Prescott College, where he served as the Coordinator of the Arts & Letters Program and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. He has also taught, as a professor or distinguished writer-in-residence, at St. Lawrence University, College of Charleston, Wichita State University’s MFA Program, University of Oklahoma’s OSLEP Program, and Our Lady of the Lake University. He regularly gives readings, workshops, lectures, and seminars at colleges, universities, and literary organizations around the country.
Born and raised in Texas, he now lives with his wife, the playwright and poet Charissa Menefee, and their children, in Ames, IA.