Jonathan Penner

Jonathan Penner’s most recent book is a story collection, This Is My Voice, published by Eastern Washington University Press as the winner of the Spokane Prize. Private Parties, his earlier collection, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His novels are Going Blind (Great Lakes Colleges Association First Novel Award) and Natural Order. His novella, The Intelligent Traveler’s Guide to Chiribosco, is a guidebook to a nonexistent land. His stories have appeared in Harper’s, Commentary, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and many other magazines. His story “This Is My Voice” was published in Sunday supplements through the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project, and “Emotion Recollected in Tranquillity” appears in the Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. A reviewer for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, he has been a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing. His articles on writers and writing have appeared in The New Republic, AWP Chronicle, and The Writer. He has held creative writing fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arizona Commision on the Arts, as well as a Fulbright fellowship to Yugoslavia, and has read and lectured abroad under the sponsorship of the State Department. Jonathan Penner was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1940. His B.A. is from the University of Bridgeport; his M.F.A., M.A., and Ph.D. are from the University of Iowa; and he has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Since 1978 he has lived in Tucson, where he teaches fiction writing at the University of Arizona. He has also taught at the New School for Social Research, Southern Illinois University, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Hawaii. He has been married since 1968 to Lucille Recht Penner, the author of more than forty books for children.