Alan Davis's Biography

Alan Davis received a doctorate from the University of Denver and a master's degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, His third collection of stories, So Bravely Vegetative, won the Prize Americana for Fiction 2010. His other two prize-winning collections are Rumors from the Lost World and Alone with the Owl. He was born in New Orleans, near the mouth of the Mississippi, into a large Catholic family of Italian, French, and Irish ancestry. Davis has received, among other honors, two Fulbright awards (to Indonesia and Slovenia), a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and a Loft-McKnight Award of Distinction in Creative Prose. His work appears inThe New York Times Book Review, The Hudson Review, The Sun magazine, and many other print and online journals. He now lives in Minnesota, near the Mississippi's headwaters among Garrison Keillor's Lutherans, where he's a Professor in the English Department and M.F.A. program at Minnesota State University Moorhead (MSUM). He is also on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. program at Fairfield University in CT. He is currently at work on a fourth collection of stories and three novels. 

He also serves as Senior Editor at New Rivers Press. The press was founded in 1968 by C. W. "Bill" Truesdale and has published more than 330 titles. In 2001, after Truesdale's death, it was revived and relocated to MSUM, where its dual mission is to publish new and emerging writers and provide learning opportunities for students in partnership with MSUM. The press honors Truesdale's progressive spirit by publishing work with a strong sense of place that speaks to our troubled times with satyagraha (the truthforce), empathy, and aesthetic courage.