Moffett, Kevin 1972-

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Moffett, Kevin 1972-

PERSONAL:

Born 1972, in Daytona Beach, FL; married; children: son.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Gettysburg, PA. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Short story writer, journalist, and editor. Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, Emerging Writer Lecturer, 2006-07. Former staff writer and editor of Funworld.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Nelson Algren Award, 2005, for "Space"; John Simmons Short Fiction Award, University of Iowa, and Iowa Short Fiction Award, both 2006, both for Permanent Visitors; Pushcart Prize, 2007, for "The Medicine Man."

WRITINGS:

Permanent Visitors (short stories), University of Iowa Press (Iowa City, IA), 2006.

Contributor of the short story "Tattooizm" to The Best American Short Stories 2006, edited by Ann Patchett, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2006. Contributor to Future Dictionary of America, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, Nicole Krauss, and others, McSweeney's (Brooklyn, NY), 2005. Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including McSweeney's, Tin House, StoryQuarterly, Oxford American, and Chicago Tribune. Contributor of articles to periodicals, including Believer.

SIDELIGHTS:

A native of Daytona Beach, Florida, Kevin Moffett was a year and a half into a graduate writing program when he decided to leave school to pursue a writing career. An advertisement boasting the opportunity to write about amusement parks piqued his interest, and he found himself editing articles for Funworld, the official magazine of the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions. Moffett was eventually promoted to managing editor, and he began to travel around the country, visiting dozens of theme parks and attractions. An avid short story writer, he also began publishing his pieces in various literary magazines. His work was later included in such prestigious anthologies as the Pushcart Prize collection and The Best American Short Stories 2006.

Permanent Visitors, Moffett's first published collection of short fiction, won the Univeristy of Iowa's John Simmons Short Fiction Award and the Iowa Short Fiction Award. The stories in the collection are mostly set in Florida, and they portray characters forced into self-assessment as they face various dilemmas, such as the death of a loved one, boredom, and the uncertainty of the future. Heather Birrell wrote in an article for Believer: "Moffett's excellently appointed sentences and the element of soft-core satire that runs through the work lift these tales gently out of doomland and into a much more absurd, emotionally diverse, and authentic realm than any swift synopses might suggest." A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted that Moffett "piercingly depicts idiosyncratic perspectives," and described the stories as being "low-key yet sharp" and "etched with a humane vision." KGBBarLit reviewer Catherine Foulkrod remarked: "Moffett has the rare ability to render the everyday as urgent and infinitely nuanced; his motion is impossibly sensual, his language didactically poetic. He makes the old new, and in such a way he is quintessentially modern, a constant investigator and reshaper of boundaries."