Worcester Polytechnic Institute Scholar Honored for Her Collection of Short Stories on Rural Kansas

Kate McIntyre, an assistant professor of creative writing at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, is the winner of the 2020 Flannery O’Connor Award. The award, named after famous short story writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor, was established by the University of Georgia Press in 1983 as a vital launchpad for emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership. Each year, one book manuscript is selected for publication from about 300 entries.

Dr. McIntyre’s collection of stories, Mad Prairie, was selected as the winner of the prestigious annual literary award. The collection will be published by the University of Georgia Press in fall 2021. The author states that “the stories are all set in rural and small-town Kansas, where I grew up. The stories were shaped by county fairs and demolition derbies, Friday night football and field parties, my first job catering fried chicken out of a bingo hall, the salt mines, the wide-open prairies, and the skies, as the late Denis Johnson would have it, ‘as blue and brainless as the love of God.'”

Dr. McIntyre’s research interests include fiction and creative nonfiction, collaborative writing, narrative theory, literary magazine publishing, the contemporary novel, the intersection of literary and genre fiction, and the gothic. She is the managing editor of the literary journal The Worcester Review.

A graduate of Harvard Univerity, Dr. McIntyre earned a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at Oregon State University and a Ph.D. from the Univerity of Missouri.