Robert F Sommer

Fiction Writer

Olathe, KS
Kansas US
Email: 
robs7213@gmail.com
Website: 
www.uncommon-hours.blogspot.com

Author's Bio

Robert F. Sommer has published two novels, Where the Wind Blew and A Great Fullness. His 2018 nonfiction collection from Fomite Press, Losing Francis: Essays on the Wars at Home, which chronicles his son’s deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq as an Army infantryman and return home to civilian life, received the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. Sommer teaches part-time at Avila University in Kansas City and works for the Kansas Sierra Club in support of its mission to explore, enjoy, and protect the planet. He holds a doctorate in American Literature from Duke University and has also authored Teaching Writing to Adults: Strategies and Concepts for Improving Learner Performance and co-authored The Heath Literature for Composition. His blog is Uncommon Hours. He and his wife Heather make their home in Olathe, Kansas.

Publications & Prizes

Anthology:
Whirlybird Anthology of Kansas City Writers (Whirlybird Press, 2012)
Books:
Losing Francis: Essays on the Wars at Home (Fomite, 2018)
,
A Great Fullness (Fomite, 2015)
,
Where the Wind Blew (a novel) (The Wessex Collective, 2008)
Journals:
About Place Journal
,
Chronogram Magazine
,
Emrys Journal
,
New Plains Review
,
O-Dark-Thirty
,
Prick of the Spindle
,
Rathalla Review
Prizes won: 

2019 Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award for "Losing Francis: Essays on the Wars at Home." Best American Essays 2015 Notable Essay: "Leavenworth," in Rathalla Review Anthology. First Place: Memoir Category, Kansas Authors Club, 2012. Second Place: Short Fiction, Kansas Writers Association, 2013. Honorable Mention in Poetry: Winfield Arts and Humanities Council, 2015. Pushcart Prize nominations in nonfiction for "Leavenworth," Rathalla Review, 2012, and "Rust on the Hillsides," Emrys Journal, 2015.

Personal Favorites

What I'm reading now: 
Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost by William Poole, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, No-No Boy by John Okada, The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights by Richard Burton (trans.), Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

More Information

Gives readings: 
Yes
Travels for readings: 
Yes
Prefers to work with: 
Adults
Fluent in: 
English
Born in: 
New York
Raised in: 
Hyde Park, NY
New York
Please note: All information in the Directory is provided by the listed writers or their representatives.
Last update: Oct 08, 2019