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. 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, New England 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.
He grew up in northern California, west of Santa Rosa, and studied at University of California Santa Cruz (BA), University of California Santa Barbara (MA, PhD), and studied 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 (USA). He reads, lectures and leads workshops internationally, promoting his books, speaking on various topics: contemporary literature, American Indian fiction, the short story, flash and micro fiction, prose poetry, Raymond Carver, Latin American poetry, microrelatos and literary translation. His translations of works by Eugenio Montejo and Luisa Valenzuela have drawn much acclaim; he is currently completing a book of stories in translation by Edmundo Paz Soldan, a Bolivian writer of fiction. Kirk Nesset serves summers as faculty at Black Forest Writing Seminars in Freiburg, Germany, and teaches regularly as writer in residence at the Chautauqua Literary Center (Chautauqua, NY). He also plays and sings in a pair of music groups, Unkle John’s Band and Twisted Roots. When not writing, reading, rehearsing or teaching, he mountain bikes, swims and rollerblades, dividing his time between Arizona and Pennsylvania, with a cat and a mini-Pomeranian dog.