Varley O'Connor
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| Varley O'Connor | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | novelist, short story writer, actor |
| Nationality | United States |
Varley O'Connor is an American novelist and actress. She is an assistant professor at Kent State University.
[edit] Biography
Having earned a BFA in acting from Boston University, O’Connor worked for several years as an actress.[1] Her interest in writing increased to the point where she decided to enroll in the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. She graduated with an MFA in English (fiction emphasis) in 1989.
O'Connor's teaching credentials include University of California at Irvine, Hofstra University, Brooklyn College, and Marymount Manhattan College. She has also taught for the North Carolina Writers’ Network and for the Squaw Valley Community of Writers’ Summer Conference.
O’Connor's most notable acting role was playing lead in the Las Vegas premiere of Footloose! in 2000.
[edit] Works
O'Connor has published three novels,[2] all of which have been critically acclaimed: Like China (William Morrow, 1991), A Company of Three (Algonquin Books, 2003), and The Cure.[3][4] She currently teaches both fiction and nonfiction creative writing at Kent State University. O'Connor has also published a number of short stories. Her two most recent shorter publications are Suki,[5] and The Empathic. The former is a memoir dating back to her undergraduate days, and the latter is a fictional account of a woman with HIV and how she struggles to put her life back together after losing both her husband and her daughter.
O'Connor's novels deal with disparate elements; domestic marital abuse in Like China; then the struggle to balance friendship, love and success in the acting world in A Company of Three and, in The Cure, the flow and complexities of relationships in an extended family, set against a background of illness and wartime life.
O'Connor's fourth novel, The Master's Muse, will be published in May, 2012 by Scribner. It deals with the relationship between Tanaquil LeClercq and George Balanchine.
[edit] References
- ^ Varley O'Connor official website
- ^ Kent State University English Department
- ^ Bellevue Literary Press ISBN 978-1-934137-03-1
- ^ Public Libraries entry
- ^ The Sun Magazine article
