Cockefair Chair Writer-in-Residence
The Creative Writing Master of Fine Arts Program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City will host fiction writer Antonya Nelson as the 2015-16 Carolyn S. Benton Cockefair Chair Writer-in-Residence.
Nelson will speak at 6 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 20, at the Kansas City Public Library, Plaza Branch, 4801 Main Street, Kansas City, Mo. Free parking is available in the parking structure south of the library near the corner of 48th and Main. The event is free and open to the public.
The presentation will include a reading and interview by New Letters On The Air host Angela Elam for a program that will later air on the nationally-syndicated literary arts program’s weekly broadcast.
Nelson is the author of four novels, including Bound (Bloomsbury, 2010) and seven short story collections, including Funny Once (Bloomsbury, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Redbook and many other magazines, as well as in anthologies such as Prize Stories: the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She is the recipient of a USA Artists Award in 2009, the 2003 Rea Award for Short Fiction, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, and teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program, as well as in the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program. She lives in Telluride, Colorado, and Houston, Texas.
She will also teach an advanced fiction Master Class from 5:30 – 8:30 p.m., Monday, Oct. 19, in Room 104 of Cockefair Hall, 5121 Rockhill Road, Kansas City, Mo. During the class she will review submissions by several graduate students in the Master of Fine Arts Program in UMKC Creative Writing and Media Arts. Community observers are welcome.
Nelson will be in Kansas City for the annual three-day Cockefair Chair teaching residency that has long featured nationally-renowned prose writers and poets in support of continuing education in the area.
This year the Carolyn S. Benton Cockefair Chair Writer-in-Residence Program is sponsored by UMKC’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Media Arts, the Cockefair Chair program, the Department of English and the Writers at Work Reading Series in cooperation with the Kansas City Public Library.
Recent writers-in-residence have included Ellen Bryant Voigt, Charles Baxter, Dean Young, Jim Shepard, Terrance Hayes, Margot Livesey, C.D. Wright, Edward P. Jones, Eleanor Wilner, Stuart Dybek, B.H. Fairchild and Mary Gordon. For more information, please contact Michael Pritchett at 816-235-2765 or pritchettmi@umkc.edu.