Kevin Brockmeier, who will be returning this summer as fiction faculty at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, writes novels, short stories, (lists!) and memoir. His work ranges from ghost stories to love letters, from the surreal to the everyday, from memoir to middle grade mysteries. The Los Angeles Review of Books describes his work as “austere and sentimental… cerebral and cynical—and sometimes outright bizarre. ” While his style can be acrobatic in its variation, it never obscures the beating, sometimes shining, sometimes ethereal pulse of emotional honesty at the center of his stories.
Kevin is the author of the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories, Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery; and a memoir of his seventh-grade year called A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards, the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of Granta‘s Best Young American Novelists.
When Kevin isn’t on faculty at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, he frequently teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and lives and writes in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Read a story by Kevin Brockmeier: “The Invention of Separate People,” originally published in Lightspeed Magazine.
Essential Viewing: Kevin Brockmeier reads from and discusses his new book The Ghost Variations with author Karen Russell, for Politics & Prose bookstore in Washington DC.
