MOIRA CRONE

MOIRA CRONE IS THE 2009 WINNER OF THE ROBERT PENN WARREN AWARD FOR FICTION FROM THE SOUTHERN FELLOWSHIP OF WRITERS

"...Moira Crone's prose reveals a peculiar balance between psychological acuity, human sympathy, linguistic playfulness. Her interest in things Spiritual has led her work to being wittily described as "Southern Gnostic." The shape and tone of each story can vary considerably, each decision and variation arising from the work's own depths. Her ability ( and willingness) to fragment sentences to suit characters shifting states of mind can be called Joycean. The language can offer both the compressed charge of poetry energized by the suspense of narrative.
In books like What Gets Into Us, Period of Confinement, and Dream State, Crone charts a zone of family resemblance and family claustrophobia. Her work can be hilarious in dealing with contemporary moral relativism; but it always holds true to abiding faith in certain primitive, reassuring pleasures. The writer's ability to find language that approximates extreme emotional states lifts her work far above most mere quotidian realism. Moira Crone is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart for her beleaguered, if often witty, characters.
Moira Crone's growing reputation is richly deserved. The Warren Prize should bring this writer's writer an even wider readership." Citation for the Warren Prize, delivered by Allan Gurganus, with Doris Betts, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, April 3, 2009, at the Conference on Southern Literature

A story writer called "utterly sui generis" by the New York Times, Moira Crone's works have been widely anthologized. She lives in New Orleans and teaches at Louisiana State University.
For more information about her works and her biography, click on those words above.
Scroll down for descriptions of her work and her recent appearances:

Appearances, 2010: Fringe Festival, Roanoke Virginia, Sunday, Feb 12, and Monday, Feb 13.

ALDEAN CONFERENCE November 9-12, 2010. ( National Association of Teachers of English in Spain) Reading, University of Almeria, Almeria,Andalucia, Spain.


FROM A RECENT REVIEW OF WHAT GETS INTO US: IN IMAGE JOURNAL

"The Fayton North Carolina of Moira Crone's story cycle, WHAT GETS INTO US, is possessed of a strained, dreadful beauty... Fayton is a land of shirtwaist dresses, sweet tea, wealth, neighborliness, and polite euphemism: "My husband is indisposed. You know what that is? a woman says to a neighbor girl, meaning that the man is locked in his sstudy with his gun collection and has not shaved or left the house in five days. Both the comfort and the horror of the community is that the residents are always there to look after each other, even at moments like these. Crone's writing is diamond polished--hard, cool, elegant, with splendid flashes of comedy in the finely tuned dialogue. The language persuades without drawing attention to itself. The web of stories stretches from the buttoned-up, sleeked down fifties through the nineties, when everything has pretty much finished falling apart, and even the coastline is eroding, grain by grain....A book of connected stories is difficult to pull off, but Crone makes the form work through the deft use of mystery and suspense....

FROM DORIS BETTS, CHANCELLOR, FELLOWSHIP OF SOUTHERN WRITERS:

“Fayton, N.C., has here its own Sherwood Anderson as Crone interweaves four decades of a town's dreams and secret sorrows. Her skill at plot and suspense so magnify each story that together they interlock and become a complex and satisfying novel. It's like watching a magician pull from a hat a giant, astonishing rabbit who fills the stage while discussing reality and beauty in rich, literary language. All the parts of these fictions are wonderful, but their sum is a spellbinding whole

Appearances, 2009:

July 1, 2009: New Orleans, Louisiana, Cabildo State Museum: Reading and appearance with Resa Aslan, author. 6-8 p.m.

Moira Crone received the Robert Penn Warren Award for fiction from the Southern Fellowship of Writers April 3, 2009, in Chattanooga.

Appearance Friday, May 22, in Gillette House, at Smith College, during Smith Reunion, conversation fellow Smith Author, Sarah Collins Honenberger, author of Waltzing Cowboys and White Lies...

Appearances, 2008:
Words And Music: A Literary Feast in New Orleans: Short Story Panel, With Barbara Johnson and others. November 23, 2008.
Center for Literary Arts, University of Missouri, Columbia Missouri, October 22-26 2008. Reading, workshops, residency.
Panel at BOOKS BY THE BANKS, sponsored by the Cincinnati Library, Duke Convention Center, Cincinnati, November 1, 2008.

Rutgers University, Camden, New Jersey: June 25, 2008: Summer Writers Workshop, Reading and master class.

Cork, Ireland: International Conference on the Short Story in English, June (17-23) 2008. Upon Waking: Short Stories are Dreams (Talk, Reading)(Panel With Rodger Kamenetz and Robert Olen Butler.

"Still Here and Writing": Associated Writing Program Conference, New York New York Hilton, Feb 2, 2008: Talking about writing after trauma of Katrina, reading.

2007 Appearances:
Louisiana Museum in Baton Rouge, LA
Words and Music Literary Feast in New Orleans
Zona Rosa Writing Workshop, Atlanta GA
Southern Festival of Books, Nashville,
James and Mary Oswald Distinguished Writers Series
University of South Carolina at Aiken.
South Carolina Festival of Books: Reading and Panel
Tennessee Williams Festival
Prague Summer Program, Prague Czech Republic (Charles University)
Glen Workshop, Sponsored by Image Magazine, Santa Fe, N.M.