Chris McCormick
Photo by Jenna Meacham
Bio
Chris McCormick is the author of a novel, The Gimmicks (Harper, 2020), a New York Times Editors' Choice, and a short story collection, Desert Boys (Picador, 2016), winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award. His essays and stories have appeared in, among other places, the Atlantic, Los Angeles Times, and the Southern Review. The son of an Armenian mother and an American father, he grew up in the Antelope Valley on the California side of the Mojave Desert before earning his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and his MFA from the University of Michigan. He teaches in the creative writing program at Minnesota State University in Mankato, where he lives with his wife, the writer Mairead Small Staid, and their daughter.
My gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts is first and foremost a readerly one. To look at the writers and books I adore that have been aided by this award is to marvel at just how many thanks I owe. Now I get to add to that an enormous writerly gratitude. As others have pointed out, this fellowship is meaningful in both concrete and abstract ways. As a new father and full-time teacher still learning to balance the joyful demands of parenthood with my sincere devotion to the work of my students, the practical support of the fellowship means more focused time for my writing. More profound, though, are the inward effects of being entrusted by the NEA to follow through on the promise of my work. Generally, the stories I write are not about particularly timely or spectacular subjects; they’re about so-called ordinary people (“There is no such thing as an ordinary person,” Alice Munro once said, interrupting an interviewer’s question). The NEA’s support validates my faith that stories—to paraphrase Roger Ebert—aren’t about what they’re