Nan Cuba, MFA

is the author of Body and Bread (Engine Books, 2013), winner of the PEN Southwest Award in Fiction and the Texas Institute of Letters Steven Turner Award for Best Work of First Fiction; it was also listed as one of “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” in O, Oprah’s Magazine, was a “Summer Books” choice from Huffington Post, and the San Antonio Express-News called it one of the “Best Books of 2013.”  Cuba co-edited Art at our Doorstep: San Antonio Writers and Artists (Trinity University Press, 2008), and published other work in such places as Quarterly West, Columbia, Antioch Review, Harvard Review, storySouth, and Connotation Press.  Her story, “Watching Alice Watch,” was one of the Million Writers Award Notable Stories (storySouth), and “When Horses Fly” won the George Nixon Creative Writing Award for Best Prose from the Conference of College Teachers of English.  As an investigative journalist, she reported on the causes of extraordinary violence in LIFE, Third Coast, and D Magazine. She received an artist residency at Fundación Valparaiso in Spain and the Imagineer Award from the Mind Science Foundation.  She was a finalist for the Humanities Texas Award for Individual Achievement and was three times a finalist for the Dobie Paisano Fellowship.  She is the founder and executive director emeritus of Gemini Ink, a nonprofit literary center, and teaches in the MA/MFA Program in Literature, Writing, and Social Justice at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, where she is writer-in-residence.  Click here for her website.