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Paul Allen CrenshawArt Form: Greensboro, NC Phone: Featured Artist: Paul Allen CrenshawGreensboro writer Paul Crenshaw has always been interested in history and fantasy worlds, and stories that allow escape from the real world while forcing readers to confront reality. He is a 2011–-2012 N.C. Arts Council Artist Fellowship recipient.
Crenshaw holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from UNC Greensboro and since 2003 has served as an Assistant Professor at Elon University. Among many honors, he’s earned the Fred Chappell Fellowship for Creative Writing and the Gwaltney Scholarship for Creative Writing.
During the past year, he has been researching and writing about an old tuberculosis sanatorium that has been converted to a home for the developmentally disabled, capturing the varied history of the institute, the lives of the people who lived there and its effect on the nearby town where he grew up. “It is a strange place,” Crenshaw says of the Booneville, Ark. institution. “Most of it has gone to ruin—the ceilings have fallen in, the windows and doors boarded over. It is a place both historical and fantastical, a mix of the past and the present.” This undertaking resulted in two books: a collection of short stories entitled Human Development, and a novel entitled On the Mountain, both currently seeking a publisher.
His stories and essays have been published in Best American Essays, North American Review, Shenandoah and Southern Humanities Review. Works are slated for future publication in Texas Review, Weird Tales, Memoir(And), Tampa Review, Clackamas Literary Review, and Southwest Review. His essay, "Gently Down the Stream" appears in the current North Carolina Literary Review, with accompanying photos taken by his youngest daughter, Savannah.
Crenshaw is now working on a collection of short stories in which all of the characters have been affected by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. His subsequent project will be a young adult novel he describes as “slipstream literature, combining elements of speculative fiction, literary fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy.”
Read Girl in the Window (PDF) by Paul Crenshaw. |
