Literary Southwest Fall Guest Author Readings

Author K. L. Cook, poet Natalie Diaz on Campus for Nov. 9th Reading

Last updated: 10/29/2012 10:22:40 AM

K.L. Cook and Natalie Diaz Share Their Work at The Literary Southwest on Friday, November 9

On Friday, November 9, The Literary Southwest presents two Arizona writers who are making an impact on their respective genres: award-winning author K. L. Cook and rising young poet Natalie Diaz. The event begins at 7 p.m.. in the Yavapai College Library’s Susan N. Webb Community Room (Bldg. 19, Room 147) on the Prescott campus. An audience Q & A session and a book signing follow the reading.  All Literary Southwest programs are free and open to the public.

K. L. Cook is the author of three award-winning books of fiction.  His most recent book, Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions, 2011), a collection of thematically linked stories, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction.  His novel, The Girl from Charnelle (William Morrow, 2006/Harper Perennial, 2007), won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and was named a Southwest Book of the Year and an Editor’s Choice selection by the Historical Novel Society.  Cook’s first book, Last Call (Nebraska, 2004), a short story cycle chronicling three decades in the lives of a West Texas family, won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. His stories and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, including Glimmer Train, One Story, Poets & Writers, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Brevity, The Louisville Review, Shenandoah, Witness, American Short Fiction, Arts & Letters, Post Road, Colorado Review, Puerto del Sol, and Harvard Review.  His work has also been anthologized in The 2012 Best American Mystery Stories, Best of the West 2011, Now Write: Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, When I Was a Loser: Essays on (Barely) Surviving High School, and Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education. Cook has been awarded an Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship, the 2011 Spur Award for Best Short Story set in the American West, the Grand Prize from the Santa Fe Writers Project, and residency fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center. Born and raised in Texas, he now lives in Prescott, Arizona, where he is a professor at Prescott College and Spalding University’s brief-residency MFA in Writing Program.

Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. After playing professional basketball in Europe and Asia, she completed her MFA in Creative Writing from Old Dominion University in 2007. Her work has been published in the Iowa Review, Narrative Magazine, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Ploughshares, Black Renaissance Noire, and others. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2012. She lives in Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she directs a Mojave language revitalization program, working with the last speakers of the Mojave language at Fort Mojave.

The Hassayampa Institute presents The Literary Southwest is made possible by the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe, the Arizona Humanities Council, Yavapai College, and the Yavapai College Foundation, with additional support provided by the Peregrine Book Company.

For complete author and series information, visit: www.yc.edu/hassayampa or contact Series Director Jim Natal through Yavapai College at 928-776-2295, or via email at: james.natal@yc.edu.