SMSU to welcome visiting writer Kevin Brockmeier
The SMSU Creative Writing and English Program will host Kevin Brockmeier on Monday, Sept. 16. He will be on campus visiting classes during the day and giving a public reading in the evening in Charter Hall 201 at 7 p.m. Brockmeier is the first guest of the visiting writer series for the 2024-25 academic year.
Brockmeier is the author of the memoir “A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip,” the novels “The Illumination,” “The Brief History of the Dead,” and The Truth About Celia,” the story collections “The Ghost Variations,” “Things That Fall from the Sky” and “The View from the Seventh Layer,” and the children’s novels “City of Names” and “Grooves: A Kind of Mystery.” His work has been translated into 17 languages. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.
Brockmeier has published his stories in such venues as The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, Tin House, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and New Stories from the South. He has received the Borders Original Voices Award, three O. Henry Awards (one, a first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEA Grant. In 2007, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
The reading will feature stories from Brockmeier’s latest book “The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories” published in 2021 by Pantheon. The reading is free and open to the public.
For comment on the visiting writer, contact: Dr. Jessica Hennen, jessica.hennen@SMSU.edu, Assistant Professor of English at SMSU.