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	(Photo by Kenny Hatchett)	Karen Salyer McElmurray, Assistant Professor of English, teaches Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Prose Form & Theory, and other creative writing courses. She advises The Peacock’s Feet, the student undergraduate magazine, and is Creative Nonfiction Editor for Arts and Letters. Complete Résumé
	Signing Books at GCSU Read an excerpt from Motel of the Stars Order at UGA Press	Karen Salyer McElmurray has worked with several creative writing programs, both as a student and in professorial capacities. She has an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Virginia, an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, where she studied American Literature and Fiction Writing. Before coming to GCSU, she taught at Lynchburg College in Virginia and at Berry College, where she was Writer-in-Residence. She has been at Georgia College since 2003, where she continues to dream in often fully shaped plots, imagines ways to revisit India, and often coaxes her cats, Hank and Earl, up from the basement. She and her husband, John Johns, sometimes divide their time between Georgia and North Dakota. Karen’s first novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, was reprinted in paperback by University of Georgia Press in 2004. The novel received the 2001 Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Appalachian Writing and has been called “a story about the human heart and about how salvation can come from the human experience of love” (Chicago Tribune). Her work has also received numerous awards including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. The novel was the June 2005 selection of the Kentucky Educational Television Book Club.
	Order at UGA Press	Most recently, Karen has published a memoir, Surrendered Child: A Birth Mother’s Journey, which novelist Lee Smith has called “an enlightening and redemptive work of art.” The book is a Kentucky birth mother's story of the relinquishment of her son to adoption in 1973. Surrendered Child was winner of the AWP Award Series for Nonfiction and was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2004. The memoir was a National Book Critics Circle Notable Book and has been selected as winner of the Georgia Author of the Year Award for memoir. Her new novel, The Motel of the Stars, will be published by Sarabande in 2008.
	Read an excerpt from Surrendered Child Read more reviews from The Southern Register Southern Living Rain Taxi	“McElmurray has composed a moving meditation on loss and memory and the rendering of truth and story.” From a review of Surrendered Child, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

GCSU is a member of The Association of Writers and Writing Programs One of only 20 member colleges nationwide

Creative Writing Program Campus Box 44 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA 31061 English Office: (478) 445-4581 MFA Office: (478) 445-3509