In a stunning literary debut, A. Rooney has created some of the freshest characters in recent fiction: Hollis, the duck-footed mathophile looking for love; Lowell, who longs to know what might have been had he raised his lost son; James, aching with the memory of a puzzling past and the chances he didn't take; and Percy, a musician whose scandalous days have led to unexpected tranquility. Desire for connection, thirst for reconciliation, the effort required to put one foot in front of the other to make the best of life, this is The Colorado Motet.
ARooney background
Andrew Rooney currently teaches graduate creative writing (including the novel, flash fiction, travel writing, poetry, and other courses) at Regis University in Denver. He returned from a two-year teaching assignment at the American University of Nigeria in 2008. He has also taught at DU, UCD, Metro State, and China Agricultural University. He has an MFA from Naropa University.
His novel, The Fact of Suffering, based on his time in Africa, is with an agent. His linked fiction collection, The Colorado Motet, was published by Ghost Road Press, March 2005, and can be found on Amazon. Travels in Ekphrasia, a collaborative art/writing chapbook, was published July 2006. Works-in-progress include two novels, The Dictionary of Finds, and The Moirologist in Passing.
Recent fiction has appeared in Please Stay on the Trail Anthology (Spring 2006), Open Windows Anthology (Summer 2005), Wazee Journal (Spring/Summer 2005), Edgar Literary Review (Jan. 2005), Awakenings Review (Summer 2002), Spectacle Journal (Winter 2002), Hardground 2000 (anthology), won first prize in Seedhouse magazine's fiction competition (1999), was a Winnow Press Chapbook Award 2004 semi-finalist, and was a finalist in the Faulkner Novella 2000 Competition. In 2009 Chapter Six of The Fact of Suffering was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was editor and contributor to the award-winning fiction anthology Jumbo Shrimp in 1998. In 2005 he was Fiction Judge for the Colorado Authors' League, and co-final judge for the Colorado Book Award 2005, Fiction category.
Recent public readings include: at AU in Nigeria, Travels in Ekphrasia II, show and lecture (art and writing), April 2007; Three before the Harmattan, poetry reading, November 2007; Earth in Verse, student/faculty reading for Earth Day 2007; and Mixed Messages, a new prose and poetry reading, Feb. 2008. Travels in Ekphrasia I, reading and lecture, took place at DU Women's College, Jan. 2007. The Colorado Motet, a reading from the collection, was held at Tattered Cover Bookstore, Denver, June 2005; and Using Autobiographical Characters, lecture/workshop, was presented at Lighthouse Writers, Denver, March 2006. He was a guest lecturer on ekphrastic writing at San Juan College in Farmington, New Mexico, in September 2010.
In the distant past he was editor-in-chief of Alma Magazine, a regional feature magazine in southern Colorado; editor of The Standard, a quarterly features newspaper in Pueblo, Co.; editor of InSite Magazine, a publication of Woodward-Clyde (an engineering corporation in Denver); a film reviewer and feature writer for the Valley Courier (daily newspaper) in Alamosa, Co.; and sports editor for the Raton Daily Range, in Raton, New Mexico.
He is currently re-reading Madame Bovary, and has recently read The Buddha, Cutting for Stone, Moby Dick, Olive Kitteridge, The Kingdom by the Sea, Slow Boats Home, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, Webster's 1828 Dictionary, The Larrsons, and a few he can't remember. On the nightstand are Crossing to Safety, Magic Mountain, Say You're One of Them, and Fast Forward - plus back issues of the New Yorker.
