Karen Salyer McElmurray, Author

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; To Tell the Truth; Fearless Confessions; Listen Here; Dirt; Family Trouble; Red Holler; Women and Their Machines. 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. Her essay, “Strange Tongues,” was the recipient of the Annie Dillard Award from The Bellingham Review. With poet Adrian Blevins, she has co-edited a collection of essays from Ohio University Press, Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia. During 2015-16, she will be Visiting Professor at Gettysburg College.

Salyer McElmurray is presented in partnership with the FIU Writers on the Bay Series.