K. L. Cook is an American writer from Texas. He is the author of Last Call (2004), a collection of linked stories spanning thirty-two years in the life of a West Texas family, and the novel, The Girl From Charnelle (2006).
Last Call (University of Nebraska Press 2004) was the inaugural winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Stories in the collection were originally published in literary journals such as Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, Shenandoah, and Post Road. Two of the stories won the Grand Prize in the 2002 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Arts Series.
Set mostly in Texas and the American Southwest, the stories sympathetically depict the blue collar lives of oil riggers, railroad and steel construction workers, x-ray technicians, waitresses, and a con-man who tries to buy Costa Rica and examine themes of multi-generational family dynamics, adolescence, and the tension between work and personal relationships.
The book received wide acclaim from critics, who called it “a remarkably accomplished first collection” (Kirkus Reviews), “a breathtakingly haunting and magical tapestry of human emotion” (Booklist), and “a deep and haunting book” (Harvard Review).
The Girl From Charnelle (William Morrow 2006/Harper Perennial 2007) deals with the same family of characters in 1960, focusing on the middle daughter, Laura Tate, who is left to take care of her father and brothers after the mother of the family mysteriously disappears. Set in the fictional Texas Panhandle town of Charnelle, against the backdrop of the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, the novel examines the intellectual and erotic coming of age of a young woman, as well as the legacy of parental abandonment.
The Girl From Charnelle was on several 2006 "best books" lists. It was an Editor's Choice selection of the Historical Novel Society and was named a Southwest Book of the Year, a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for High School Students, and a Mississippi Press/Gulf Coast Live Top Three Books of the Year. It was also a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award.
Reviewers called it “a resonant first novel” (Entertainment Weekly), “a strong, complex story from a promising new literary voice” (Kirkus Reviews), “a debut impossible to put down until the dramatic and realistic conclusion” (Library Journal, starred review), and “a marvelously written and well-paced, deeply affecting novel that ought to bring the writer several more awards” (Houston Chronicle).
Cook has also published essays, poetry, reviews, and other stories in such journals and magazines as Poets & Writers, Harvard Review, Shenandoah, Alligator Juniper, and Arts & Letters and contributed to several anthologies, including Teachable Moments: Essays on Experiential Education (2006), Now Write: Fiction Exercises from Today's Best Writers and Teachers (2006) and When I Was a Loser (2007).
Cook is the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts fellowship for fiction, several Pushcart Prize nominations, and artist colony fellowships to The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Ucross, and Blue Mountain Center.
He teaches creative writing and literature at Prescott College, a small liberal arts college in Arizona, known for its experiential education, environmental, and social justice mission. For several years he served as the Arts & Letters Program Coordinator and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs. Since 2004, he has been a member of the graduate faculty at Spalding University Brief-Residency MFA in Writing Program.
