Bio
K. L. (Kenny) Cook is the author of six books: a novel, three collections of stories, a poetry collection, and a book of essays on the art and craft of fiction. He has won numerous awards, prizes, fellowships, and grants, and his work has been published widely in literary journals, magazines, and anthologies.
He grew up in a working-class family in Houston, Dallas, and Amarillo, and lived in Southern Illinois, Coastal Carolina, Upstate New York, and for two decades in the mountains of Central Arizona as a professor at Prescott College, before moving to Ames. In college, he studied literature, theatre, and creative writing, as well as history and psychology. Over his career, he has taught a broad range of writing and literature courses, including Travel Writing, Short Story Cycle, Forms of Fiction, the Ecstasy of Influence, Shakespeare, Literature of the American Dream, the American West in Film & Literature, and Family Systems in Film and Literature.
As a professor at ISU, he co-directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment, served on the Faculty Senate, and taught introductory, advanced, study-abroad, and graduate courses, including creative writing workshops and courses on the theory and practice of teaching creative writing. He received two university awards for excellence in graduate mentoring and was named a College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Dean’s Faculty Fellow in the Arts. His author website is www.klcook.net.
Research Areas
Creative writing (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and scriptwriting), forms of fiction, short story cycles, literature of the American Dream, Western American literature, place-based and environmental literature, Shakespeare, literary influence, family systems theory, creative writing pedagogy
Selected awards & honors
Iowa State University
- Dean’s Faculty Fellow in the Arts, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Award for Excellence in Graduate Mentoring, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Humanities Scholarship Enrichment Initiative Grant, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
- Research Grants, Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities (CEAH)
External
- Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction
- Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction
- Spokane Prize for Short Fiction
- Southwest Book of the Year
- Editor’s Choice Selection, Historical Novel Society
- James Jones First Novel Fellowship Finalist
- Best Short Story About the American West, Western Writers of American
- Arizona Commission on the Arts Fellowship & Project Grant
- Artist residency fellowships to the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, Blue Mountain Center, Vermont Studio Center, and Fairhope Center for the Writing Art
Publications
I am the author of six books of fiction, poetry, and essays. My 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 Longlist Finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize. My most recent books are “Marrying Kind,” a collection of short stories; a collection of poetry, “Lost Soliloquies;” and “The Art of Disobedience: Essays on Form, Fiction, and Influence.”
My stories, essays, articles, and poems have appeared 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. My 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, a Poets & Writers anthology on the literary marketplace, and Now Write: Fiction Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers.