Description:

Audrey Petty will give a talk as the Simon Blattner Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing. 

She is the editor of High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (Voice of Witness/McSweeney’s Press). Her stories have appeared in such publications as StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, The Louisville Review, The Massachusetts Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod and African American Review. They have also been anthologized in Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing and Black Writing from Chicago. Her essays have been featured in The Oxford American, Saveur, ColorLines, The Southern Review, Gravy, Callaloo, Cornbread Nation 4 and Best Food Writing 2006 anthology. Her poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review and Cimarron Review.

Petty has been awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Colony, the Richard Soref Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she’s received fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council and the Hewlett Foundation. She has taught in the writing programs at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Knox College.