THE FRONT STORY: Rebecca Meacham’s debut story collection, Let’s Do, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction from UNT Press and was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. Described by Benjamin Percy as “a kiss laced with arsenic,” the book was a finalist for both the Paterson Fiction Prize and the ForeWord Book of the Year, and earned a Wisconsin Library Award for Outstanding Achievement. Rebecca’s flash fiction chapbook, Morbid Curiosities, won the New Delta Review Chapbook contest, and her chapbook of flash prose, Feather Rousing, as a finalist for the Black River Chapbook Contest, from Black Lawrence Press. Her nonfiction includes reviews, interviews, gushing praise for other writers, and thoughts on writerly theft. Her prose has been arranged to music, translated into Polish, and carved into woodblocks and letter-pressed by steamroller.
A native Ohioan, Rebecca holds an M.F.A. from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati. As Professor of English and Humanities at UW-Green Bay, Rebecca founded and directs the University of Wisconsin System’s only B.F.A. in Writing, and she advises the undergrads who create the international journal of the arts Sheepshead Review. She is the founder, Director, and Publisher of the Teaching Press at UW-Green Bay, an undergraduate-run hybrid publisher and printing house that produces a range of titles, including an illustrated nature journal, a fold-out book chronicling a landmark environmental clean-up, and an historic collection of Hmong American storytelling. An active collaborator community arts programs, Rebecca is a former President of Green Bay’s UntitledTown Book and Author Festival and former committee member for Door County Reads Winter Festival. She coordinates UW-Green Bay’s service-learning collaboration with TimeSlips Creative Storytelling International. Her teaching and community work have been recognized by both University and regional awards.
THE BACKSTORY: Rebecca’s first book, written at age six, was entitled “All About Rocks,” and it was. After exhausting the topic, she asked her mother for better subject matter. “Go write a poem,” her mother said, so Rebecca looked at the sky and wrote a poem: “South Carolina Skies.”
While she’s never gotten better at titles, she eventually began writing stories. About people. And, occasionally, animals. Most of them living.
Her favorite writers are E.L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Dan Chaon, Antonya Nelson, Aimee Bender, and whoever she happens to be teaching right now. She tweets (and yes, no matter what else it’s called, she tweets), but mostly retweets, at @ibeccanne.
