for Short Fiction. It includes sixteen stories, most of which were previously published in literary journals, including Glimmer Train and One Story; a number of the individual stories won prizes in their own right. "Filament," which initially appeared in One Story, was included in Best American Mystery Stories 2012, selected by Robert Crais. "Bonnie and Clyde in the Backyard," which originally appeared in Glimmer Train, won the Best Short Fiction Award from the Western Writers of America, was cited as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 2010, and selected for inclusion in the anthology Best of the West 2011. Marrying Kind Marrying Kind (Ice Cube Press 2019), Cook's third collection of linked stories, explores the people, vocations, and places we wed ourselves to. Several of the nine stories revisit the working class, hardscrabble characters and themes of Cook's earlier books (including Laura Tate, the title character from The Girl from Charnelle). This collection also moves into new narrative and thematic territory and includes stories from the perspective of a Shakespearean actor ("Portrait of a Shakespearean Actor as a Young Man"), a disgraced academic couple seeking refuge in Florida ("Morning of the Shark"), and a pair of stories about an historian and his wife, an attorney ("Day of the Dean" and "Puppy"). Lost Soliloquies Lost Soliloquies (Ice Cube Press 2019), Cook's debut collection of poems, consists primarily of dramatic monologues, persona poems, and soliloquies in the voices of both historical and fictional characters, including Clyde Barrow, Frank Lloyd Wright, and secondary and off-stage characters from Othello and Macbeth. The Art of Disobedience The Art of Disobedience: Essays on Form, Fiction, and Influence (Ice Cube Press 2020) collects eighteen essays on the process, art, and craft of writing, drawn from Cook's decades of teaching. "The best art is always disobedient," Cook argues in the introductory essay. "The creative works that move us, compel us, provoke us, haunt us, and transform us--the works that matter most to us and that we cherish--break the rules in significant ways. Certainly, characters act out, act up, transgress, and misbehave. But the writer must also surprise, subvert, deconstruct, and engage in serious mischief in terms of genre, form, or sensibility, in order to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar." The essays in the first section, "Habits of Art," explore the methods writers use to motivate themselves, thirty theories about the aim and purpose