MOIRA CRONE

Moira Crone is a widely published short story writer and novelist.
She received the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2009 for the body of her work. The prize citation, written by Allan Gurganus with Doris Betts, states: " Moira Crone's prose reveals a peduliar balance between psychological acuity, human sympathy, and linguistic playfulness. Her interest in things spiritual has led her work to be wittily described as "Southern Gnostic." 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... She is a fable maker with a musical ear, a plentitude of nerve, and an epic heart for her beleaguered, if often witty characters."

A native of Eastern North Carolina, she lives in New Orleans. Her publications include the forthcoming novel, The Not Yet, (2012) What Gets Into Us,(2006) a collection of stories, Dream State (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi in 1995; Paperback 1997), also stories, A Period of Confinement (New York: G.P. Putnam and Sons, 1986, Paperback, New York: Harper and Row, 1987. French Translation: Paris: Gallimard 1986) a novel, and The Winnebago Mysteries and Other Stories (New York: The Fiction Collective/​ Braziller 1982), stories and a novella.

Her works have been published in numerous magazines, including: The New Yorker,Mademoiselle, Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, North American Review, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, and Habitus. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Oxford American, Beliefnet, Altnet, ( online) Family Circle, Working Mother, American Homestyle, and other websites and journals. She has been included in several anthologies, such as Best from the Ohio Review, 25th Anniversary Anthology, Smith Voices; Various Gifts, American Made, New Stories by Southern Women, Wide Awake in the Pelican State, Intersections, and, most recently, Best of LSU Fiction.

Her stories have been chosen for the “Year’s Best” by the award anthology New Stories From The South five times. She has been selected for an individual artist's grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, (1990) and a fellowship at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College at Harvard, (1987-88.) She won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Short Story Prize in 1994, and William Faulkner/​Wisdom Award for Novella in 2004. She won an ATLAS grant from the State of Louisiana in 2005-2006.

A graduate of Johns Hopkins and Smith College, Moira Crone taught in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lousiana State University for several years. She directed the program from 1997 through 2002. She has also taught at Hopkins, and Goucher College, and is on the faculty of the Prague Summer Program in the Czech Republic. In 2010, she led a workshop as part of the Low Residency Creative Writing Program at the University of New Orleans, in San Miguel De Allende, Mexico. She has been a guest artist and teacher at Image Journal's Glen Workshops, and at the University of Missouri's Center for the Literary Arts, and has appeared at the International Conference on the Short Story in English as a speaker, teacher, critic, and artist.
In 2010, she was the Plenary Speaker at the AEDEAN conference ( Spanish Association for Anglo American Studies) in Almeria, Spain.
Among her former students are novelists and short story writers Connie Porter ( All Bright Court, Imani All Mine) Dinty Moore (The Accidental Buddhist), Olympia Vernon ( Eden, Logic, A Killing in this Town) Virgil Suarez ( The Cutter, Latin Jazz, Havana Thursdays, Going Under) and Ronlyn Domingue, ( The Mercy of Thin Air) and Laurie Drummond (Anything You Say Can and Will be Held Against You.) and Hardy Jones ( Every Bitter Thing). For four years, ending in 2002, she was the fiction series editor of the University Press of Mississippi, where she selected and shaped several original works of fiction that became New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and Times Picayne Notable Books of the Year.

The mother of two daughters, Anya and Kezia, she is married to writer and poet Rodger Kamenetz.