HPMEC Announces Writer-in-Residence for June Retreat
PIGGOTT — Kate Osana Simonian of Texas Tech University has been selected to serve as the inaugural Writer-in-Residence for the month of June at the Hemingway-Pfeiffer Museum & Educational Center.
She will spend the time in residence at the museum and will serve as a mentor for other writers at the museum’s June writers’ retreat. The residency is made possible by an underwriting sponsorship by Piggott State Bank.
“We are thrilled to have Kate with us this summer,” said museum director Adam Long. “The selection committee and I felt that she is a great fit for our community, and we can’t wait to work with her.”
Simonian is an Armenian-Australian essayist, short story writer and novelist from Sydney, Australia. She is on a Presidential Fellowship at Texas Tech, where she is completing a doctoral degree in creative writing. She holds a master of fine arts degree in fiction from Brooklyn College (CUNY) and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Technology Sydney.
Her work has been published by, or is forthcoming in, Kenyon Review Online, Colorado Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North,Post Road, The Chicago Tribune, and Best Australian Stories. She has won various honors, including the Nelson Algren Award, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Tennessee Williams scholarship to Sewanee Writers Conference. Along with acting as an associate editor for Iron Horse, she is the fiction editor for Opossum: A Literary Marsupial, a journal on the intersection of literature and music.
In addition to serving as a mentor for the June retreat, Simonian will spend the month working on her own writing in the barn studio where Ernest Hemingway penned portions of A Farewell to Arms. She will also live in a loft apartment on the Piggott Square.
HPMEC is an Arkansas State University Heritage Site at 1021 W. Cherry Street, Piggott, Arkansas. Tours are on the hour Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. For additional information, call 870-598-3487.
