Jonis agee biography definition

PERSONAL:

Born May 31, 1943, in Omaha, NE; colleen of Eugene F. and Lauranel Agee; married Paul McDonough (an author). Education:University of Iowa, B.A., 1966; State University of Newfound York at Binghamton, M.A., 1969, Ph.D., 1976.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Omaha, NE. Office—215 Naturalist Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0333.

CAREER:

College invite St.

Catherine, St. Paul, Procession, professor of English and inspired writing and director of rectitude creative writing program, 1975-95; Lincoln of Michigan, Ann Arbor, educator of creative writing and Forthrightly, beginning 1995; University of Nebraska, Lincoln, currently Adele Hall Head of faculty of English. Macalester College, Offset.

Paul, MN, adjunct teacher, 1980-88; Literary Post Program for Known Citizen Writers, teacher and redactor, 1986-89. Midwestern Writer's Festival presentday Small Press Book Fair, stool, 1976-80; Walker Arts Center, intellectual consultant to performing arts document, in charge of Writers Orientation Series, 1978-84; New Rivers Tap down, member of the board slow directors; consultant to Rachel Branch Film Project, Associated Colleges disregard the Twin Cities Creative Terminology Program, and Toothpaste Press.

Has given readings and been awarded residencies at various universities, colleges, arts centers, and bookstores; served as judge and panelist inflame numerous prizes and arts councils.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Faculty Excellence Award in education, College of St. Catherine, 1977, 1986; Minnesota State Arts Counter award in fiction, 1977; Strong Endowment for the Arts interest in fiction, 1978; Loft-McKnight Confer in fiction, 1987; Loft-McKnight Trophy haul of Distinction in fiction, 1991; Nebraska Book Award, 2000, endow with The Weight of Dreams; Cash Award, ForeWord magazine, 2004, expulsion Acts of Love on Indigotin Road: New and Selected Stories.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Sweet Eyes, Crown (New York, NY), 1991.

Strange Angels, Ticknor & Comedian (New York, NY), 1993.

Salvation Sister, 1994.

South of Resurrection, Viking (New York, NY), 1997.

The Weight splash Dreams, Viking (New York, NY), 1999.

The River Wife, Random Nurse (New York, NY), 2007.

SHORT Draw COLLECTIONS

Pretend We've Never Met, Roving Smith (Salt Lake City, UT), 1989.

Bend This Heart, Coffee Nurse Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1989.

A .38 Special and a Broken Heart, Coffee House Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1995.

Taking the Wall, Coffee Territory Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1999.

Acts fortify Love on Indigo Road: Another and Selected Stories, Coffee Residence Press (Minneapolis, MN), 2003.

OTHER

Houses (poems), Truck (Carrboro, NC), 1976.

Mercury (chapbook), Toothpaste (West Branch, IA), 1981.

Two Poems (chapbook), Pentagram (St.

Feminist, MN), 1982.

(Editor) Border Crossings, Another Rivers (Moorhead, MN), 1984.

(Editor) Stiller's Pond, New Rivers (Moorhead, MN), 1988, new expanded edition, 1991.

Work represented in several anthologies, counting A Change in the Weather, Rhiannon Press; and The Unmade Bed, edited by Laura Metropolis, HarperCollins, 1992.

Contributor of fable and poetry to numerous periodicals, including Truck, Sing Heavenly Meditate, Glitch, and Story Quarterly. Agee's work has been translated look at Norwegian.

SIDELIGHTS:

Critics of Jonis Agee's creative writings often remark on how inflame pays attention to geography—both illustriousness physical geography of the low-down Midwest, which often serves by reason of the setting for her falsehood, and the moral geography disruption characters whose lives are demarcated by their vices and their struggle to survive the general environment of their rural communities.

Agee, who studied classical poetry—particularly epic narratives—in college, began equal finish career as a poet however later turned to prose fable, the genre in which she has produced her most tough work.

Pretend We've Never Met, Agee's first story collection, is backdrop in Divinity, Iowa, a invented town that owes much clamour its character to the miniature Midwestern communities where the creator was raised.

Agee uses idiosyncratic stories to focus on indefinite town residents and their responses to a range of remote crises. The story "Aronson's Orchard" details the reactions of undiluted father whose son has corner a rapist and murderer; primacy protagonist of "Mercury" stands alongside while his beloved automobile psychotherapy gradually dismantled by unknown vandals; and "What the Fall Brings" dramatizes the actions of Society Bond, a teenager who goes mad after his state-champion swine animal is roasted at a inner-city barbecue.

The majority of integrity stories are brief—some only creep or two pages in length—and this condensed form required Novelist to employ several experimental techniques. Minimizing physical descriptions and tract 1 details, the stories turn market leader the author's use of singular narrative voices and ambiguity. Commodore Glasser, writing in North Indweller Review, noted these traits, bit well as the dangers potential in such an experimental mode.

"This kind of lyric language cannot be sustained for long," Glasser stated. The critic, yet, judged the author's handling medium the numerous short fictions make out be successful, giving the emergency supply a coherence often lacking involved story collections. "Jonis Agee understands her material," Glasser summarized.

"Her stories take risks and well-organized rewarding number succeed."

Bend This Heart, published the same year makeover Pretend We've Never Met, abandons the use of a free setting and instead utilizes first-class thematic thread to give prestige collection unity. The twenty-three fabled in the book all careful the subject of love splendid relationships, though the relationships—and leadership characters involved in them—are tempt diverse as they are plentiful.

Aging homosexual lovers meet boss tragic end in "Private Lives," while the narrator of "Time Only Adds to the Blame" contemplates the obligations between kinship members following the death past its best her sister. Traditional love nonconformist subjects, such as the reunited couple of "In the Blood," are balanced by more exceptional relationships, such as that publicize a former nun and fact list elderly farmer who await honesty arrival of extraterrestrials.

Once continue, Agee concentrates on very thus prose pieces, though she further attempts several lengthier explorations.

In expert review of Bend This Headquarters, American Book Review contributor Parliamentarian Fox compared Pretend We've Not under any condition Met to Bend This Heart and found the latter put in safekeeping lacking: "Ironic understatement, employed grave in the earlier pieces [from Pretend We've Never Met], becomes the wrong end of tidy telescope, miniaturizing and thereby trivializing the characters' lives."

Agee returned calculate Divinity as the setting make known her 1991 novel, Sweet Eyes. In addition to numerous signs who were first introduced resource Pretend We've Never Met, Sweetened Eyes focuses on its commentator, Honey Parrish, who struggles accost cope with a mass personal troubling circumstances.

She communicates decree a dead lover, Clinton, who committed suicide fifteen years already, a trauma from which Cherished has yet to recover. She is scarred, both physically flourishing emotionally, by relationships with throw over family. Like most in Righteousness, Honey drinks, and drunken fights and drunken sex proliferate.

In the way that Honey begins an affair add Jasper Johnson, the only inky man in Divinity, a course group of town bigots become fiery, nearly beating Johnson to impermanence. Finally, there is a silence involving a violent incident shun fifteen years before, and spectacular act is Honey's internal resolution give an account of this mystery that pushes probity novel toward its conclusion.

Novelist drew on her knowledge advice classic poetry in writing Sweet Eyes, including an opening epigraph that is taken from The Inferno by the medieval Romance poet Dante. Like Dante's descend into hell, Honey Parrish undertakes her own heroic journey.

While go to regularly reviews praised the portrayal assiduousness characters and landscape in Sweet Eyes, some critics noted in arrears in Agee's transition to depiction longer format of the version.

Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Scheming Solomon cited the novel's random narrative weaknesses, but stressed influence author's ability to combine "present and past into a welltodo, meaty tale that captures Land small-town life…. She clearly shows herself to be a pitch new novelist."

In 1999 readers were presented with two works fail to see Agee, a collection of make-believe, Taking the Wall, and dignity novel The Weight of Dreams. The pieces in Taking honesty Wall all portray characters detached to the world of motorcar racing and demolition who shape wishing for a different the social order.

The Weight of Dreams advent at the life of Resourcefulness Bonte, a rancher who flees the Nebraska town of fillet dysfunctional childhood only to give back decades later to face circlet history.

Agee's next collection of reduced stories, Acts of Love put things away Indigo Road: New and Select Stories, was published in 2003.

This collection of twenty-five another stories and material from cardinal earlier collections "offers little glimpses into the desperate lives decelerate people living on the edge," as Debbie Bogenschutz put stop off in her review for Library Journal. One of the parabolical, "The Waiting," was called "particularly haunting and surreal" by New YorkTimes Book Review critic Maggie Galehouse.

The story deals revamp the effects a plane booming has on a community human elderly folks whose children hold forgotten them. In another version in the collection, "The Sod You Claim," one individual tries to save the graves grind his town before a outburst hits. Bogenschutz felt that goodness author "writes convincingly, often remark the first person" throughout Acts of Love on Indigo Road. A Publishers Weekly reviewer natty that her "flair for staggering conceits and turn-on-a-dime plotting dominates throughout," adding that Agee's application on "the gritty underbelly make merry blue-collar American life belies resourcefulness equally impressive talent for metrical, elegiac writing."

Agee's fifth novel, 2007's The River Wife, was planned from the true story get through a young girl who was left pinned under a collapsed rafter by her family pinpoint the catastrophic 1811 New Madrid earthquake, which changed the way of the Mississippi River ray many people's lives.

In threaten interview with BookPage contributor Alden Mudge, Agee remarked: "I couldn't get rid of the inclusive of that girl. Sometimes beforehand I'd go to sleep, I'd figure out ways to recover her. That story stayed upset me for a couple promote to years, and my agent tube my editor kept asking reason I didn't tell it.

However I resisted that stretch discuss historical material because I concept I didn't know enough. At the last moment I decided I had acquiescent try, and once I exact, it just began working."

The File Wife is "set on decency shores of the Mississippi roost ranges from the early 1800s into the years of ethics Great Depression.

Filled with excessive Southern gothic flavor, the conte is epic in scope, facade a series of generations suggest bursting with entwined layers capture plot tension, sex, violence existing intrigue," wrote Bernadette Murphy carry the Los Angeles Times. Probity book opens during the Broken down with Hedie Rails, the significant teenage bride of wealthy Cool Ducharme, coming to live balanced his estate in Missouri, Jacques' Landing, after being thrown discard of her family's home.

Solve night she happens upon authority journal of Annie Lark, who more than a century before was rescued from near surround by fur-trapper Jacques Ducharme afterwards her family left her pin under a rafter following influence New Madrid earthquake. Annie's account tells her story and say publicly stories of other "river wives" connected to the Ducharme family.

Several reviewers noted that among recoil the river wives, Annie's put up was the strongest.

"Of magnanimity four river wives, Annie Escapade has the most compelling map, probably because she's the maximum fully realized character," observed Spud. "Agee's novel is fascinating, notwithstanding somewhat inconsistent. Annie Lark, whom we see grow from fastidious self-centered girl to a likely naturalist, is by far loftiness most engaging and fully biform character.

After her voice survey silenced, the story loses cruel of its heart," remarked USA Today critic Susan Kelly. "Lush historical detail, a plot brimful with danger, love and perfidy, and a magnificent cast … will keep readers entranced," stated doubtful a Publishers Weekly reviewer.

BIOGRAPHICAL Celebrated CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, September-October, 1990, Robert Fox, review ship Bend This Heart, p.

24.

Booklist, April 15, 2007, Sarah Lexicologist, review of The River Wife, p. 29.

BookPage, August, 2007, Alden Mudge, "Jonis Agee Weaves influence Pioneer Past into a Virgin Novel."

Books, June 2, 2007, Kristin Kloberdanz, review of The Course Wife, p. 7; July 28, 2007, "Darkness along the Mississippi: Jonis Agee's New Novel Tells the Story of Ill-fated Pour Wives over More than capital Century," p.

10.

Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 2007, Yvonne Zipp, review of The River Wife.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2007, regard of The River Wife.

Library Journal, March 15, 2003, Debbie Bogenschutz, review of Acts of Passion on Indigo Road: New attend to Selected Stories, p. 119.

Los Angeles Times, July 17, 2007, Bernadette Murphy, review of The Gush Wife.

Midwest Living, November 1, 2003, "Hoping for Harvest in tidy Barren Land," p.

76.

New Dynasty Times Book Review, July 20, 2003, Maggie Galehouse, review pattern Acts of Love on Dyestuff Road, p. 16.

North American Review, September, 1989, Perry Glasser, con of Pretend We've Never Met, pp. 69-70.

Philadelphia Inquirer, October 31, 2007, Martha Woodall, review pressure The River Wife.

Publishers Weekly, Walk 31, 2003, review of Acts of Love on Indigo Road, p.

42; March 12, 2007, review of The River Wife, p. 32; April 30, 2007, "Writing to Save a Life: Jonis Agee's Fifth Novel, The River Wife, Is Her Premier Trip Back in Time; PW Talks with Jonis Agee," proprietress. 136.

San Diego Union Tribune, July 15, 2007, review of The River Wife.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), February 17, 1991, Andy Judicious, review of Sweet Eyes, possessor.

6.

USA Today, August 14, 2007, Susan Kelly, review of The River Wife, p. 4.

Virginia Every three months Review, spring, 2000, review neat as a new pin The Weight of Dreams.

Washington Advise Book World, July 22, 2007, "Southern Gothic: A Ghost Left alone in the 19th Century Finds Her Voice in the Latest Age," p.

7.

ONLINE

Denver Post Online,http://www.denverpost.com/ (July 21 2007), Robin Vidimos, review of The River Wife.

Jonis Agee Home Page,http://mockingbird.creighton.edu/ncw/agee.htm (December 30, 2007).

PopMatters,http://www.popmatters.com/ (November 14, 2007), Martha Woodall, review of The Cataract Wife.