Cynthia Shearer

Cynthia Shearer holds an M.A. in English from the University of Mississippi and is the author of two works of fiction. The Wonder Book of the Air (Pantheon /Vintage 1996) won the 1996 prize for fiction from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. The Celestial Jukebox (Shoemaker & Hoard/Avalon, 2005) was cited in the Cambridge Companion to American Literature After 1945 as an example of new “global” Southern literature. Awards for her short fiction include Honorable Mention in Best American Short Stories, and inclusion in various anthologies such as Beyond O´Connor (University of Georgia Press, 2003) and The Best of the Oxford American (2002) and The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing (2008). She was a recipient of a fiction fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2000. In 2005, her Speakeasy essay, based on her six years of experience as the curator of the William Faulkner home Rowan Oak, appeared in the thirtieth anniversary issue of the Pushcart Prize Anthology. At TCU she serves as Associate Director of the Center for Writing, and teaches writing for the Department of English. She has served as a digital content consultant for Norton Publishing Co. In 2018, she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, at the University of Georgia.