Tag: Garrett Hazelwood

If you’re not already familiar with Lydia Conklin’s work, go read her immediately. Her stories are often irreverent, deeply attuned to the mundane absurdities of daily life, and awake to the painful comedy of the mistakes we can’t help but make as we navigate our relationships and the rocky landscapes of our own emotions. Her writing is funny and sad and true. It explores themes of sexuality; the abundant awkwardness of adolescence; and the transition into the equally fraught, interminable, fake-it-till-you-make it experience of becoming an adult. I couldn’t be more excited to be welcoming her to the Delta Mouth stage this year. —Garrett Hazelwood, Publicist

Oh, I love Lydia’s stories. I’m regularly amazed by how she comes up with these big-hearted characters who are making earnest attempts at figuring out the world—with deadpan hilarity every step of the way. Somehow she makes soul-searching a fun adventure for readers, self-discovery a rollicking group activity. She’s a stellar writer, a talented illustrator, a generous teacher, and The Southern Review has been fortunate to play a little part in her budding career (if you can still call a double-Pushcart winner “emerging”). I can’t wait to welcome her to Baton Rouge. —Emily Nemens, coeditor and prose editor of The Southern Review

Lydia Conklin was the 2015-2017 Creative Writing Fellow in fiction at Emory College. She has received two Pushcart prizes; fellowships from Princeton, MacDowell, and Yaddo; and has been published in Tin House, The Southern Review, Narrative Magazine, and in a compilation of the best of the last twenty-five years of the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.