Period 1968 – Name Shelby Hearon | Role Novelist | |
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Born January 18, 1931 (age 93)
Marion, Kentucky, U.S. ( 1931-01-18 ) Occupation Novelist, short story writer Alma mater University of Texas at Austin Education University of Texas at Austin (1953) Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, US & Canada Books Ella in bloom, Year of the Dog, Owning Jolene, Life estates, Hug Dancing | ||
Shelby Hearon (January 18, 1931 - December 10, 2016) was an American novelist and short story writer.
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Early life
Hearon was born in 1931 in Marion, Kentucky. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1953.
Career
Armadillo in the Grass, her first novel, was begun in 1962 and accepted for publication by Knopf in 1967. Hearon had a teaching career at several colleges, and served on the Texas Commission on the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Awards and recognition
Hearon has been awarded fiction fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received the Texas Institute of Letters award twice, and a lifetime achievement award from the Texas Book Festival. Five of her short stories were awarded NEA/PEN syndication Short Story Prizes and she received a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. She has also received a New York Women in Communications Award.
Her novel Owning Jolene won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award.