Patricia Ann
McNair has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest. She's managed a
gas station, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar and breaded
mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange
and taught aerobics. Today she is an Associate Professor in the Fiction
Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, where she received the
Excellence in Teaching Award as well as a nomination for the Carnegie
Foundation's US Professor of the Year.
McNair's fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in various anthologies, magazines, and journals including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers, Other Voices, F Magazine, Superstition Review, Dunes Review, River Teeth, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, and others. She is also published in The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction edited by Dinty W. Moore. She's received numerous Illinois Arts Council Awards and Pushcart Prize nominations in fiction and nonfiction.
He debut collection, The Temple of Air, was named a "stunning debut" by The Nervous Breakdown. Reviewer Donna Seaman of Booklist writes "McNair's plainspoken yet imaginative, complexly unnerving, and haunting stories raise essential questions of fate and will, appearances and truth, guilt and compassion."
McNair divides her time between city and small town with her husband, the visual artist Philip Hartigan. Check out her website at: www.patriciaannmcnair.com
