|
|
|
K. L. Cook is the award-winning author of two books of fiction, both set in the Southwest: Last Call, a collection of linked stories that won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction, and The Girl From Charnelle, a novel that won the 2007 Willa Cather Literary Award for Contemporary Fiction and was a 2006 Southwest Book of the Year, a Mississippi Press/Gulf Coast Live Best Book of the Year, and a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for high school students. His fiction, essays, articles, and poetry have been published widely in such journals as The Harvard Review, Threepenny Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Poets & Writers, and Shenandoah, as well as the anthologies Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education, Now Write: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers, and When I Was a Loser: Essays on (Barely) Surviving High School. He has been awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts artist fellowship, the grand prize in the Santa Fe Writers' Project Literary Arts Series, and been a fellow at such artist colonies as The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, and Ucross. He was the 2007-08 Viebranz Visiting Professor/Writer-in-Residence at St. Lawrence University in New York, and is a professor of creative writing and literature at Prescott College, a private college nationally known for its environmental and social justice mission. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of Spalding University's MFA in Writing Program, and recently taught in England as part of their international residency program, lecturing on Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence, and issues related to the art and craft of fiction. He has lectured, given readings, and taught seminars at many universities and colleges across the nation and regularly teaches such courses as The American West in Film and Literature, Shakespeare, Literature of the American Dream, Travel Writing, Literature as Experience, Family Systems in Film and Literature, and a variety of undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops.
|
|
|
Environments in Fiction
May 16-20, 2009
at the University of Oklahoma
|
What does the phrase “literary environment” mean? Does it simply refer to place or setting? Or does it also encompass landscape, habitat, and ecosystem, as well as the intersection of nature, culture, and history? How does environment embody our conceptions of paradise and property, frontier and civilization, home and foreignness, memory and trauma, familiarity and otherness? How do certain literary forms—for example, ghost stories, westerns, science fiction, and mysteries—create meaning through their depictions of environment? In this seminar, we'll read novels, a play, stories, and essays, as well as study some films, in order to probe different conceptions of “literary environment.” We'll also write reflective, narrative, and analytical pieces, some of which we'll share in workshops and presentations.
Click here for syllabus
|
The Class Reading List: (These books and articles supplied
by OSLEP)
-
Edward P. Jones’ The Known World.
- Joan Silber’s The Size of the World.
- John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row
- Selected essays & stories.
|
|
