K.L. Cook is the author of three award-winning books of fiction. Love Songs for the Quarantined, a collection of thematically linked stories, won the Spokane Prize for Short Fiction and was a Longlist Finalist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Prize. His novel, The Girl from Charnelle, won The Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and was named a Southwest Book of the Year, an Editor’s Choice selection from the Historical Novel Society, and was a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Prize, among other honors. Cook’s first book, Last Call, won the inaugural Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction.
Cook’s stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including Poets & Writers, Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, Arts & Letters, and Harvard Review. He has received two grants from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and residency Fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center, the Ucross Foundation, the Vermont Studio Center and the Fairhope Center for the Writing Arts. Cook is currently an associate professor of English at Iowa State University, where he teaches in the M.F.A. in creating writing and environment program. He is also a member of the graduate faculty of Spalding University’s brief-residency M.F.A. in writing program.
