Robert Boswell
Encyclopedia
Life
Robert Boswell is the author of eleven books. His stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Pushcart Prize Stories, Best Stories from the South, Esquire, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Colorado Review.He has been faculty at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
The Bread Loaf Writers' Conference is a writers' conference held every summer at the Bread Loaf Inn, near Bread Loaf Mountain, east of Middlebury, Vermont...
.
He shared the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston
University of Houston
The University of Houston is a state research university, and is the flagship institution of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1927, it is Texas's third-largest university with nearly 40,000 students. Its campus spans 667 acres in southeast Houston, and was known as University of...
with his wife, Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelson
Antonya Nelson is an American author and teacher of creative writing who writes primarily short stories.-Life and education:Antonya Nelson was born January 6, 1961 in Wichita, Kansas....
, who he met in a creative writing workshop at the University of Arizona taught by Mary Carter. They were married July 1978. Their daughter Jade was an art student at New Mexico State University
New Mexico State University
New Mexico State University at Las Cruces , is a major land-grant university in Las Cruces, New Mexico, United States...
, and son, Noah, is attending the University of Kansas
University of Kansas
The University of Kansas is a public research university and the largest university in the state of Kansas. KU campuses are located in Lawrence, Wichita, Overland Park, and Kansas City, Kansas with the main campus being located in Lawrence on Mount Oread, the highest point in Lawrence. The...
as an English and chemistry double-major.
Boswell teaches creative writing at the University of Houston
University of Houston
The University of Houston is a state research university, and is the flagship institution of the University of Houston System. Founded in 1927, it is Texas's third-largest university with nearly 40,000 students. Its campus spans 667 acres in southeast Houston, and was known as University of...
.
Awards
- Virtual Death was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award.
- His play Tongues won the John Gassner Prize
- two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships
- Guggenheim Fellowship
- Iowa School of Letters Award for Fiction
- PEN West Award for Fiction
- the Evil Companions Award
Nonfiction
-a book about a real-life treasure hunt in New Mexico (co-written with David Schweidel).Reviews
In many ways, Robert Boswell fits the mythology of the contemporary man in the American West. Known as Boz, he's a lanky, laconic six-footer with a closely cropped beard. Typically garbed in jeans and rumpled shirts with rolled-up sleeves, he drives a pickup truck and listens to Bruce Springsteen. He lives in an adobe house near the Rio Grande in Las Cruces, New Mexico, less than fifty miles from the Mexican border. His voice is a baritone, coming from way deep, and he's a slow talker—slower still with strangers. He claims the desert as his landscape of preference, insisting that the sky really is larger out there, and too much time away from the West makes him claustrophobic.
Kirkus:
Through this collection
of 14 works, as he demonstrates again and again, the short story's pulse and meaning lie not in the places where the
author points the light, but in those areas that remain purposefully obscure.