Lee Conell
Photo by Garrett Warren
Bio
Lee Conell is the author of the forthcoming novel The Party Upstairs (Penguin Press), and the story collection Subcortical (Johns Hopkins University Press), which won the Story Prize Spotlight Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Memorious, Glimmer Train, Guernica, and American Short Fiction. She has been awarded the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Short Story Award, a U.S.-Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission. She has taught at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Sewanee: the University of the South, and Vanderbilt University, where she received her MFA.
I often find myself quoting from the stories of the author Grace Paley, especially this line: “Everyone, real and invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” The National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship forges something like that sense of openness for me, giving me a crucial sense of space and support—both in financial ways and in ways that are harder to articulate but that have something to do with nerve. To receive this award for fiction that in many respects delves into women trying to claim their own desire of space for art-making—a claim that often seems audacious to them, or that seems like a demand only open to those born with the financial means and cultural cachet to support this vocation—is especially meaningful for me. There’s a multitude of writers I admire who have received NEA fellowships (Paley among them!) and to be listed alongside them feels like something that is itself a bit of fiction. I’m really grateful.