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 Long-list Finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize. In 2019-20, K. L. Cook published three new books in three different genres in a rare triple launch: 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 widely 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-Coordinator of the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and a longtime faculty member of the low-residency MFA Program in Writing at Spalding University. |