Leslee Becker came to Colorado State University’s English department as an assistant professor of creative writing in 1990, the first woman in fiction hired for the Master’s of Fine Arts program. Over her thirty-year career at CSU—she retired in 2020—Becker taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses in fiction writing and literature and directed scores of MFA fiction theses, as well as honors theses and independent studies.

As an equally distinguished fiction writer, Becker received a number of awards and honors, among them the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society Award; the Nimrod/Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize; the James Michener/Copernicus Society Award; a Rocky Mountain Women’s Fellowship; a Lannan Fellowship; and the Ludwig Vogelstein Award. Becker’s short stories appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines, among them, The Atlantic, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, New England Review, Boston Review, and, just earlier this year, Narrative. Her collection of short stories, The Sincere Café, won the Mid-List Press Fiction Award and was published in 1997. At her death, Becker was working on two manuscripts:  another collection of short fiction, “The Little Gentleman,” and a novel, “Cold River City.” Becker died at the age of seventy-six on February 7, 2022.