ABOUT THE AUTHOR

K. L. Cook is the award-winning author of six books of fiction, poetry, and essays. His first book, Last Call, a collection of linked stories chronicling three decades in the life of a Texas Panhandle family, won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. The Girl from Charnelle, a novel focusing on the same fictional family, won the Willa Award for Best Contemporary Fiction and was an Editor’s Choice selection of the Historical Novel Society, a Southwest Book of the Year, and a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award, among other honors. Love Songs for the Quarantined, a thematically linked story cycle, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was a longlist finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize.

K. L. Cook most recent books, published in 2019-2020, are: Marrying Kind, a new collection of short stories; a collection of poetry, Lost Soliloquies; and The Art of Disobedience: Essays on Form, Fiction, and Influence.

​His stories, essays, articles, and poems have appeared in such journals and magazines as Glimmer Train, One Story, Harvard Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Poets & Writers, Threepenny Review, Brevity, Louisville Review, Hotel Amerika, Shenandoah, Bloom, and American Short Fiction. His work has also been anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories, Best of the West, The Prairie Schooner Book Prize: Tenth Anniversary Reader, Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education, The Short Story Project, Now Write: Fiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, and a Poets & Writers anthology on literary marketing.  Other honors include a Western Writers of America Award for Best Short Story, the Grand Prize from the Santa Fe Writers Project, an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship and grant, and residency fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center.

He is Professor of English and co-directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. In 2021, Cook received the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring, earned a grant from the Center for Excellence in Arts & Humanities, and was named the Dean's Faculty Fellow in the Arts. Since 2004, he has been a faculty member of the the low-residency Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University.
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