Kevin Brockmeier Concludes Special Collections' Lecture Series on Arkansas Writers

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – October is American Archives Month, and the University of Arkansas Libraries’ special collections department is commemorating the month by hosting a series of lectures titled “Mysteries, Mistresses and Murder: Celebrating Three Arkansas Authors.” The third and last lecture in the series will present Kevin Brockmeier of Little Rock, who will read from his recent work, followed by a question and answer session with the audience, from 3 to 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 29, in Giffels Auditorium in Old Main. A welcome reception will begin at 3 p.m. with the program following at 3:30 p.m.

Brockmeier is the author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia, the teen novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery, and the story collections Things that Fall From the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. He has published stories in The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope, The Oxford American, The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and the O. Henry: Prize Stories anthology. His work has been translated into 15 languages. He received the Borders Original Voices Award, the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, an Italo Calvino Short Fiction Award, a James Michener-Paul Engle Fellowship, three O. Henry Awards (one first prize), the PEN USA Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment of the Arts grant. Recently he was named one of Granta magazine’s Best Young American Novelists.

Brockmeier has gained critical recognition for his lyrical prose. His fiction borders on the fantastical and often draws on fairy tales for inspiration. Characters find themselves in absurd situations, such as in the novel Grooves: A Kind of Mystery when Dwayne, a seventh grader living in a small town, runs a phonograph needle across his jeans and discovers that the grooves in his jeans contain a hidden call for help. In The Brief History of the Dead, the still-existing dead dwell in a place known as The City, but last there only as long as someone remembers them. In City of Names, a fifth-grader named Howie discovers a fold-out map of his home city that allows the boy to transport instantly to any point when he utters the location’s “true” name. 

Brockmeier, a native of Florida, grew up in Little Rock and graduated from Parkview High School, where he studied creative writing with Judy Goss. He received a bachelor’s of art in creative writing, philosophy and theater from Southwest Missouri State University and was awarded his Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.

American Archives Month is a collaborative effort by professional organizations around the nation to raise awareness of the value of archival materials and to encourage persons and organizations to preserve records of enduring historical value. The special collections department of the University of Arkansas Libraries was created in 1967 to foster research and writing in the history and culture of Arkansas and the surrounding region. It is an archival repository of more than 12,000 linear feet of documents in the Manuscripts Collection, more than 28,000 cataloged titles in the Arkansas Collection, which houses books by Brockmeier and other Arkansas authors, and the Rare Books Collection, and more than 150,000 photographs, broadsides and maps.