Nancy Peacock has been writing fiction since she was in fourth grade. Her first novel, Life Without Water, was chosen as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. It was followed by a second novel, Home Across the Road, and a memoir, A Broom of One’s Own: Words on Writing, Housecleaning and Life.
Nancy’s writing life has been defined as much by what she has done (worked many low paying jobs to support herself) as by what she has not done (Nancy never attended college). She believes that everyone’s story is important. Nancy lives, writes and teaches in Orange County, North Carolina.
Karen Salyer McElmurray’s Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, was an AWP Award Winner for Creative Nonfiction. Her novels are The Motel of the Stars, Editor’s Pick by Oxford American, and Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, winner of the Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing. Other stories and essays have appeared in Iron Horse, Kenyon Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Riverteeth, and in the anthologies An Angle of Vision, Listen Here, Dirt, and To Tell the Truth. Her writing has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. She has taught in the MFA Program at Georgia College, and the Sewanee School of Letters. She currently teaches at St. Mary’s College and in the Low-Residency MFA Programs at West Virginia Wesleyan University and Murray State University.
