Born: 1968
Ohio connection: Former Resident
Cincinnati
Brockway Clarke was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to Peter Paslee (an English professor) and Elaine Giustina (a dental hygienist) Clarke. His family moved to Little Falls in upstate New York when he was three and he lived there for the next twenty-six years before moving to South Carolina and then to Ohio. He has lived in Ohio since 2001. Clarke earned a B.A. from Dickinson College (1990) and received his Ph.D. in American literature from the University of Rochester in 1998. He was a lecturer in English at Cornell University (1997-98); Assistant professor of English at Clemson University (1998-2001) and was an assistant professor of English, and director of creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati (2001-2010). Clarke became an associate professor at Bowdoin College in Maine in 2010. His books include The Ordinary White Boy; What We Won’t Do; Carrying the Torch; An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England; Exleym, and The Happiest People in the World. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award in Fiction. His work has appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, the Believer, the Georgia Review, and the Southern Review; in the Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies; and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.
Awards:
2009 Ohioana Book Award Finalist; 2008 National Endowment for the Arts; Mary McCarthy Prize for short fiction, 2000, for What We Won’t Do; Walter Dakin Fellowship, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, 2002; literature fellowship in prose, National Endowment for the Arts, 2008. Wesleyan Writers Conference fellow; Lightsey fellowship; Tennessee Williams scholarship; Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference scholarship; New York State Writers’ Institute award; Christopher Isherwood fellowship.