Background
Janet Sawhill Peery was born on July 18, 1948 in Wichita, Kansas, United States. She is the daughter of Walter A. and Joyce E. (Davis) Sawhill.
(From National Book Award finalist, Janet Peery, comes thi...)
From National Book Award finalist, Janet Peery, comes this "powerful, haunting, and beautifully written" (Tucson Citizen) collection of linked stories set against the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Etta and Mackie Spoon are sisters growing up on an Oklahoma farm. Etta is rebellious and mercurial, Mackie, shy and overshadowed by her sister, but both carry the weight of dark family secrets. When tragedy strikes, they set out on their own, in search of something greater, something beyond the pallid and brutal landscape they know. Vivid and, at times, devastating, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed novelists and storytellers. From National Book Award finalist, Janet Peery, comes this "powerful, haunting, and beautifully written" (Tucson Citizen) collection of linked stories set against the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Etta and Mackie Spoon are sisters growing up on an Oklahoma farm. Etta is rebellious and mercurial, Mackie, shy and overshadowed by her sister, but both carry the weight of dark family secrets. When tragedy strikes, they set out on their own, in search of something greater, something beyond the pallid and brutal landscape they know. Vivid and, at times, devastating, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed novelists and storytellers. From National Book Award finalist, Janet Peery, comes this "powerful, haunting, and beautifully written" (Tucson Citizen) collection of linked stories set against the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Etta and Mackie Spoon are sisters growing up on an Oklahoma farm. Etta is rebellious and mercurial, Mackie, shy and overshadowed by her sister, but both carry the weight of dark family secrets. When tragedy strikes, they set out on their own, in search of something greater, something beyond the pallid and brutal landscape they know. Vivid and, at times, devastating, What the Thunder Said is the long-awaited third work of fiction by one of our most acclaimed novelists and storytellers.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/031242793X/?tag=2022091-20
2008
( With the same piercing vision that distinguishes her no...)
With the same piercing vision that distinguishes her novel The River Beyond The World, Janet Peery unveils a stunning collection of stories. Settled mostly in the American Southwest, her characters-men and women caught between two places, literal and figurative-try to understand the mysteries that overarch or undergird their lives.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312180381/?tag=2022091-20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312169868/?tag=2022091-20
(SMU Trade PB 1993; story collection, in near like-new con...)
SMU Trade PB 1993; story collection, in near like-new condition.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001TFFEPG/?tag=2022091-20
("A brilliantly moving and unforgettable novel." - Jill Mc...)
"A brilliantly moving and unforgettable novel." - Jill McCorkle, author of Life After Life Janet Peery’s first novel, The River Beyond the World, was a National Book Award finalist in 1996. Acclaimed for her gorgeous writing and clear-eyed gaze into the hearts of people, Peery now returns with her second novel, The Exact Nature of Our Wrongs. On a summer evening in the blue-collar town of Amicus, Kansas, the Campbell family gathers for a birthday dinner for their ailing patriarch, retired judge Abel Campbell, prepared and hosted by their still-hale mother Hattie. But when Billy, the youngest sibling―with a history of addiction, grand ideas, and misdemeanors―passes out in his devil’s food cake, the family takes up the unfinished business of Billy’s sobriety. Billy’s wayward adventures have too long consumed their lives, in particular Hattie’s, who has enabled his transgressions while trying to save him from Abel’s disappointment. As the older children―Doro, Jesse, ClairBell, and Gideon―contend with their own troubles, they compete for the approval of the elderly parents they adore, but can’t quite forgive. With knowing humor and sure-handed storytelling, Janet Peery reveals a family at its best and worst, with old wounds and new, its fractures and feuds, and yet its unbreakable bonds.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1250125081/?tag=2022091-20
Janet Sawhill Peery was born on July 18, 1948 in Wichita, Kansas, United States. She is the daughter of Walter A. and Joyce E. (Davis) Sawhill.
Peery received Bachelor of Arts degree in Speech Pathology and Audiology from Wichita State University in 1975. He also became Master of Fine Arts in Fiction at Wichita State University in 1992.
Before Peery began to write fiction in her forties, Janet Peery worked at different positions, including waiting tables, fast food counter work, lifeguarding and teaching swimming, as a speech therapist, a hospital respiratory technician, and an insurance physical technician.
After that she began to publish her short stories in literary journals.
Peery's first collection of short stories, Alligator Dance, which was published simultaneously in hardback and paperback by Southern Methodist University Press in 1993, was extolled in the most enthusiastic terms by fiction writer Dorothy Allison in the New York Times Book Review.
The logical next step in Peery’s literary career was a novel, and Allison, in her review of Alligator Dance, expressly looked forward to the one that Peery was then writing. The novel, The River beyond the World, was published in 1996. Focusing on the long-term relationship between two women—a Mexican housekeeper and her American employer—the novel is a meditation on the two cultures as well as a story driven by complex personalities.
Nowadays she teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Peery has taken that position in 1993.
She has given lectures at many American colleges and universities, has taught at Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers, Antioch University LA, Sweet Briar College, Glen Workshop at Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, Sewanee Writers Conference and other conferences.
She has worked as Writer in Residence for the National Book Foundation's American Voices Project on the Rosebud Reservation in Mission, South Dakota and Rocky Boy's Reservation in Montana.
Peery received the Seaton Award from Kansas Quarterly, the Jeanne Charpiot Goodheart Prize from Washington and Lee University (twice), two Pushcart Prizes and inclusion in The Best of the Pushcart Prize, StoryQuarterly's Fiction Prize, Idaho Review's Editor's Prize, selection for Best American Short Stories 1993 (ed. Louise Erdrich), and six citations for 100 Distinguished Stories from Best American Short Stories.
She won the National Book Award in 1996 for her novel The River Beyond the World.
What the Thunder Said, a novella and stories, won the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction in 2008 and the 2008 WILLA Award from Women Writing the West for Contemporary Fiction.
At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, she was awarded the honorific University Professor and was the recipient of the Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia.
(From National Book Award finalist, Janet Peery, comes thi...)
2008( With the same piercing vision that distinguishes her no...)
(SMU Trade PB 1993; story collection, in near like-new con...)
("A brilliantly moving and unforgettable novel." - Jill Mc...)
Peery married William H. Peery on January 23, 1976. They divorced in January 1988. They have 3 children - Joanna, Gretchen and Bridget. She married again Cy Bolton on November 5, 1994.
