Varley O'Connor
Varley O’Connor’s first novel, Like China, described by the New York Times as “a first novel that soars,” was published by William Morrow in 1991. Her second novel, A Company Of Three, about the world of theater and acting, came out from Algonquin Books in 2003. Her third novel, The Cure, was published by the Bellevue Literary Press in 2007. Scribner published her fourth novel, The Master’s Muse, in May 2012. Her most recent novel, The Welsh Fasting Girl, was released in 2019 by the Bellevue Literary Press.
Her short prose has appeared in Faultline: Journal of Art and Literature, AWP Writer’s Chronicle,Driftwood, Algonkian Magazine, The Sun, Publishers Weekly, and in an anthology, Naming the World and Other Exercises for Creative Writers, edited by Bret Anthony Johnston (Random House, 2008).
After graduating with a BFA in acting from Boston University, O’Connor worked as a stage, film, and television actor before entering the MFA Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine.
She has taught writing and literature at Irvine, Hofstra University, Brooklyn College, Marymount Manhattan College, the North Carolina Writers’ Network, and for the Squaw Valley Community of Writers’ Summer Conference, most recently in July 2012.
In fall 2007 Varley O’Connor joined the faculty at Kent State University, where in addition to undergraduate creative writing, she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction writing in the Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium MFA program.