Cornelia Nixon

Cornelia Nixon is a novelist, short-story writer and teacher. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and has lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was married to poet Dean Young from 1983 to 2010. In 2015, she married her former teacher, man of letters Hazard Adams.

Education

Nixon attended the University of California, Irvine where she earned her B.A.. She received an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Career

Nixon served as a teacher at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana from 1981 to 2000. Nixon joined the faculty at Mills College in Oakland, California in 2000 and continues to teach there today.^[1]

Nixon's first book was Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women, a critical essay that examines what Nixon sees as the change in gender power dynamics between D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love (which is supposed to be a sequel to The Rainbow).

In 1991, Nixon authored Now You See It, a novel in stories. It was very favorably reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the daily New York Times, 'by Richard Locke in The Wall Street Journal, in The Chicago Tribune, Entertainment Weekly, and elsewhere.

Nixon's next literary work was published in 2000. Angels Go Naked is a collection of interrelated short stories that together form a larger narrative. It was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review.^[2]

Jarrettsville is Nixon's most recent novel and was released October 1, 2009. It has been reviewed in The New York Times,^[3] The Washington Post,^[4] Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Magazine. It received the MIchael Shaara Prize for Excellence in Civil War Fiction, awarded by the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.

Nixon has also contributed to periodicals such as the New England Review, the Iowa Review and Ploughshares.^[5]

Awards

• The 2010 Michael Shaara Prize for Excellence in Civil War Fiction, awarded to her novel Jarrettsville^[6]
• First Prize O. Henry Award 1995
• O. Henry Award 1993
• Nelson Algren Award, Chicago Tribune (1988)
• Carl Sandburg Award in Fiction (1991)
• National Endowment for the Arts (1992)
• Pushcart Prizes in 1995 and 2003
• Carnegie Fellowship to the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe 1986-87

Works

• Jarrettsville: A Novel. Counterpoint. 2009. ISBN 978-1-58243-512-1.
• Angels Go Naked: A Novel, publisher Counterpoint, Paperback released November 2010
• Angels go naked. Counterpoint Press. 2000. ISBN 978-1-58243-062-1.
• Now you see it: a novel. Harper Perennial. 1992. ISBN 978-0-06-097472-5.
• Now You See It. Little, Brown. 1991. ISBN 0-316-61170-0.
• Lawrence's leadership politics and the turn against women. University of California Press. 1986. ISBN 978-0-520-05431-8.

Anthologies

• Bill Henderson, ed. (2003). Pushcart prize XXVII: best of the small presses. Pushcart Press. ISBN 978-1-888889-35-2.
• Prize Stories 1995: The O. Henry Awards, First Prize Winner. Ed. William Abrahams, Doubleday, 1995.
• Pushcart Prize XX: Best of the Small Presses (1995). Ed. Bill Henderson. Pushcart Press.
• William Abrahams, ed. (1993). Prize Stories 1993: The O. Henry Awards. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-42531-5.
• Modern American Bestsellers, Moscow (in Russian), 2002.
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. Ed. Vendela Vida. McSweeney's Press, 2007.

References

1. http://www.mills.edu/academics/faculty/eng/cnixon/cnixon.php
2. The New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/04/16/reviews/000416.16gologot.html. Retrieved April 30, 2010. Missing or empty |title= (help)
3. Goodheart, Adam (October 25, 2009). "The War at Home". The New York Times. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
4. Goolrick, Robert (October 24, 2009). "Book review: 'Jarrettsville' by Cornelia Nixon". The Washington Post. Retrieved April 30, 2010.
5. http://www.pshares.org/authors/author-detail.cfm?authorID=1119
6. "Michael Shaara Prize". Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. Retrieved 9 August 2011.

External links

• Cornelia Nixon at the Biography Resource Center
• Contributions by Cornelia Nixon at Ploughshares
• Cornelia Nixon at the Gale Virtual Reference Library