Sept 15 at 7:30 pm.   Kirk Nesset is author of two books of short stories, Mr. Agreeable and Paradise Road, as well as a book of translations, Alphabet of the World: Selected Works by Eugenio Montejo; he is also author of a nonfiction study, The Stories of Raymond Carver, and a book of poems, Saint X (forthcoming). He was awarded the Drue Heinz literature prize in 2007 and has received a Pushcart Prize and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. His stories, poems, translations and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals, including The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, American Poetry Review, Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Sun and Prairie Schooner, among others. His short short fictions have been widely anthologized, appearing in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, Sudden Fiction Latino, and elsewhere.

Nesset grew up in northern California, close to the coast, and studied at University of California Santa Cruz (BA) and at University of California Santa Barbara (MA, PhD), as well as abroad. He has worked as a dishwasher, a tree planter, a telemarketer, a car parker, a caterer, a writing consultant and a salesman selling wood stoves. Currently he is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. He serves summers as faculty at Black Forest Writing Seminars (Freiburg, Germany), and teaches regularly as fiction writer in residence at the Chautauqua Literary Institute (Chautauqua, NY). He also plays guitar and sings in a rock group, Unkle John’s Band, and DJs on FM radio, shows featuring gothic, darkwave, EBM, cyber pop and electro-industrial music. He is fond of mountain biking, kayaking and rollerblading, and lives with three cats and a mini-Pomeranian dog.