K. L. Cook is an American writer from Texas. He is the author of Last Call (2004), a collection of linked stories spanning thirty-two years in the life of a West Texas family, the novel, The Girl From Charnelle (2006), and the short story collection, Love Songs for the Quarantined (2011). His most recent books are a collection of short stories, Marrying Kind (2019), a collection of poetry, Lost Soliloquies (2019), and The Art of Disobedience: Essays on Form, Fiction, and Influence (2020). He co-directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University. Last Call Last Call (University of Nebraska Press 2004) was the inaugural winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Stories in the collection were originally published in literary journals such as Threepenny Review, American Short Fiction, Shenandoah, and Post Road. Two of the stories won the Grand Prize in the 2002 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Arts Series. Set mostly in Texas and the American Southwest, the stories sympathetically depict the blue-collar lives of oil riggers, railroad and steel construction workers, x-ray technicians, waitresses, and a con man who tries to buy Costa Rica and examine themes of multi-generational family dynamics, adolescence, and the tension between work and personal relationships. The Girl from Charnelle The Girl from Charnelle (William Morrow 2006/Harper Perennial 2007) deals with the same family of characters in 1960, focusing on the middle daughter, Laura Tate, who is left to take care of her father and brothers after the mother of the family mysteriously disappears. Set in the fictional Texas Panhandle town of Charnelle, against the backdrop of the Kennedy/Nixon presidential election, the novel examines the intellectual and erotic coming of age of a young woman, as well as the legacy of parental abandonment. The Girl from Charnelle was on several 2006 "best books" lists. It won the WILLA Award for Contemporary Fiction, was an Editor's Choice selection of the Historical Novel Society, and was named a Southwest Book of the Year, a School Library Journal Best Adult Book for High School Students, and a Mississippi Press/Gulf Coast Live Top Three Books of the Year. It was also a finalist for the James Jones First Novel Award. Love Songs for the Quarantined Love Songs for the Quarantined (Willow Springs Editions 2011) won the 2010 Spokane Prize