Antonya Nelson was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1961. She attended the University of Kansas and the University of Arizona, where she received an MFA in 1986. She is the author of four short story collections: Female Trouble, Family Terrorists, In the Land of Men, and The Expendables. She is also the author of three novels: Living to Tell, Nobody’s Girl and Talking in Bed. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harpers, Redbook and other magazines, as wells as in anthologies such as Prize Stories, the O. Henry Awards, and Best American Short Stories. The Expendables won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 1990 and Talking in Bed received the 1996 Heartland Award in fiction. Her books have been New York Times notable books in 1992, 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002, and she recently was named by The New Yorker as one of the “twenty young fiction writers for the new millennium.” She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and 2000-2001 Guggenheim Fellowship. She divides her time between Telluride, Colorado, and Houston Texas, where she shares, with her husband novelist Robert Boswell, the Cullen Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Biographical information prepared the year of the award.