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Andrew Geyer

Andrew Geyer was born in Austin and grew up on a working cattle ranch in Southwest Texas. He lived in Austin again in the 80s and 90s, along with stints in Columbia, South Carolina; Tishomingo, Oklahoma; Lubbock, Texas; Russellville, Arkansas; and Aiken, South Carolina. Geyer has been—among other things—a bartender, a waiter, a busboy, a bellhop, a cashier, a landscaper, a construction worker, a manager at a Birkenstock store, a student, a teacher, and a writer. A lover of the outdoors and an avid runner and canoeist, Geyer has traveled extensively in North America, Central America, South America, Europe, and North Africa.

Andrew Geyer’s latest book is the hybrid story cycle Texas 5X5, a collection of twenty-five interconnected fictional narratives by five Texas writers that was published in 2014 by Stephen F. Austin University Press. His story “Fingers,” the opening piece in the collection, won the 2015 Spur Award for Best Short Fiction from the Western Writers of America. He is the co-editor of the composite anthology A Shared Voice, published by Lamar University Press in 2013. His individually authored books are Dixie Fish (2011), a novel; Siren Songs from the Heart of Austin (2010), a story cycle; Meeting the Dead (2007), a novel; and Whispers in Dust and Bone (2003), a story cycle that won the silver medal for short fiction in the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards and a Spur Award from the Western Writers of America. A member of the Texas Institute of Letters, he currently serves as Professor and Chair of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken and as fiction editor for Concho River Review.


“At 6:15 she was standing on her front porch watering gardenias and watching another line of thunderstorms split and go around her. The same thing happened almost every day. Some days they came so close all she could smell was the rain. The wind whipped up dust from the fields until it drove like buckshot into the shuddering mesquites, and Clara Nell started to pray. 'Jesus,' she whispered. 'Jesus, Jesus....' But the only thing that came out of the sky was her topsoil. Every day the wind took a little more, and it hadn't rained in almost a year.”
Andrew Geyer
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