Varley O'Connor

Varley O’Connor’s first novel, Like China, described by the New York Times as “a first novel that soars,” was published by William Morrow in 1991. Her second novel, A Company of Three, about the world of theater and acting, came out from Algonquin Books in 2003. Her most recent novel, The Cure, will be published by the new Bellevue Literary Press on May 24, 2007.

Her short prose has appeared in Faultline: Journal of Art and Literature, AWP Writer’s Chronicle, Driftwood, and Algonkian Magazine, and is forthcoming in several anthologies. Also forthcoming is a personal essay, “Suki,” and a short story, “The Empathic,” in The Sun magazine.

After graduating with a BFA in acting from Boston University, O’Connor worked as a stage, film, and television actor before entering the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. She received her MFA in English with a fiction emphasis in 1989.

She has taught writing and literature at Irvine, Hofstra University, Brooklyn College, Marymount Manhattan College, the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and for the Squaw Valley Community of Writers’ Summer Conference, where she will again serve on the staff this August 2007.

In spring and summer 2000, O’Connor interrupted her writing and teaching careers to play a lead role in the Las Vegas premiere of Footloose! (An experience she would not have missed.)

In fall 2007 Varley O’Connor will join the faculty at Kent State University, where in addition to undergraduate creative writing, she will teach fiction and creative nonfiction writing in the Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium MFA program.