Larry Alfred Woiwode (born October 30, 1941) is an American writer who lives in North Dakota, where he has been the state's Poet Laureate since 1995. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, Gentleman's Quarterly, The Partisan Review and The Paris Review. He is the author of five novels; two collections of short stories, a commentary titled "Acts," a biography of the Gold Seal founder and entrepreneur, Harold Schafer, Aristocrat of the West, a book of poetry, Even Tide; and reviews and essays and essay-reviews that have appeared in dozens of publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post Book World. His first novel, What I'm Going to Do, I Think (1969) won acclaim, and received the William Faulkner Foundation Award for the "best first novel of 1969"; Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1975) sold over 1,000,000 copies, and was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Book Critics Circle Award. He has received two awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, including the Medal of Merit, rewarded every six years, for a "distinguished contribution to the art of the short story": a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a Lannan Foundation Studio Award; the John Dos Passos Prize, for a distinguished body of work, and the Aga Khan Prize for short fiction, and the Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award, the highest honor a North Dakota citizen may receive, among other awards and prizes, and he has published two dozen stories in The New Yorker.
Born in Carrington, North Dakota, Woiwode attended the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) for four-and-a-half years, where he worked with John Frederick Nims and Charles Shattuck, and after serving as copywriter and voice-over and live talent for a CBS affiliate in the area he left to live in New York for five years; later he returned to New York state, after the death of John Gardner, and took Gardner's position as director of the Creative Writing Program at the State University of New York, Binghamton; he was a tenured full professor there, besides directing the Creative Writing Program. He spent several years living and working on short stories and his third novel in the Chicago area before returning to North Dakota in 1978, where he lives twelve miles outside Mott and raises registered quarterhorses.
Besides his tenure at SUNY-Binghamton, he has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and conducted summer sessions as a professor at Wheaton College, Chicago, and the C.S. Lewis Seminars at Cambridge; he has also conducted seminars and workshops in fourteen states of the U.S., all of the Canadian provinces but British Columbia, and in England, Lithuania, and the Scandinavias. His work has been translated into a dozen languages, and Johnathan Yardley, of the Washington Post Book Work, named Beyond the Bedroom Wall one of the 20 best novels of the 20th Century. Woiwode has published a dozen books in a variety of genres, six of which have been named notable books of the year by the New York Times Book Review. His most recent publications are two memoirs that were widely received and reviewed, What I Think I Did and A Step From Death. He is currently Writer in Residence at Jamestown College in Jamestown, North Dakota.
Works
- Words Made Fresh: Essays on Literature and Culture (essays, 2011)
- A Step from Death (memoir, 2008)
- What I Think I Did: A Season of Survival in Two Acts (memoir, 2000)
- Aristocrat of the West: The Story of Harold Schafer (nonfiction, 2000)
- Acts (a commentary on the book of Acts, 1993)
- Silent Passengers: Stories (stories, 1993)
- Indian Affairs (novel, 1992)
- Neumiller Stories(stories, 1989)
- Born Brothers (novel, 1988)
- Poppa John (novel, 1981)
- Eventide (poems, 1977)
- Beyond the Bedroom Wall (novel, 1975)
- What I'm Going to Do, I Think (novel, 1969)
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