Blackmon WD
Professor WD Blackmon has been the Department Head of the English Department at Missouri State University (a university with 24,000 students) for the past eighteen years. He is the co-founder of the Creative Writing Program in the English Department at Missouri State, a program which has both a strong graduate and undergraduate programs, with the undergraduate program being perhaps the largest such program in the United States (with more than 600 students in the combined programs each semester). As well as doing administrative work, Dr Blackmon also teaches advanced fiction writing in the department.
Professor Blackmon received his PhD at the University of Denver (where he had a teaching fellowship), his Masters of Arts at the University of Utah (where he received a Special Fellowship in the Humanities), and his Bachelors of Arts at the University of Arkansas (where he had an academic scholarship). He also was awarded a full academic scholarship to the University of Texas, but declined that scholarship to attend the University of Arkansas.
Dr Blackmon has won a Book-of-the-Month Club Fellowship Award for his fiction writing (with internationally acclaimed authors Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison as the judges). He also won the prestigious and competitive Woodrow Wilson Fellowship for university teachers. His short stories have appeared in such publications as the Associated Writing Programs’ (organizing the 300 university Creative Writing programs in the United States And Canada) Intro series (with RV Cassill as editor), The Kansas Quarterly, The Mississippi Review, Short Story, The Carolina Quarterly, and the Western Humanities Review. His scholarly writing has appeared most frequently in The Denver Quarterly.
Blood and Milk: A Novel in Stories, Professor Blackmon’s recent book, was published by Et Alia Press and features photo illustrations from internationally noted photographer Julie Blackmon, whose work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Time magazine (a cover), Italian Vogue, Italian Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Magazine.
