bio
Peg Alford Pursell earned her MFA in Creative Writing from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her fiction has received awards such as The State Fiction Award (S.C.), S.C. Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship, S.C. Arts Commission Prose Alternate Fellowship, and American Fiction Award Finalist. Her short story collection manuscript was a short-list finalist for the Flannery O’Connor Short Fiction Award. New stories have been published in or are forthcoming from The Los Angeles Review, Joyland, Staccato Fiction, Emprise Review, Precipitate Journal, The Fabulist, The Big Ugly Review, Pure Francis, Divine Dirt Quarterly, Her Royal Majesty, Annalemma, and others. Two of her stories were performed at Stories on Stage in Sacramento in May 2011. Her 90-word, one-sentence story "Fragmentation" is the title story of the Burrow Press Anthology (February 2011) Fragmentation and Other Stories. Her 990-word story "Project" published in Annalemma Magazine, Summer 2011, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She evidently has an affinity for stories with word counts that are multiples of nine.
Her poetry has appeared in the English Journal (honorable mention) and the Live Poets Society IV anthology. She is a former board member of the Marin Poetry Center and serves as MPC's current newsletter editor.
She also serves on the advisory board of Litquake, on the advisory board of TEDxMarin, and as a director on the board of the California Writers Club-Marin. She's the recipient of one of the Northern Bohemian's Boho Awards 2012 honoring the arts.
Peg founded and curates Why There Are Words, a monthly literary reading series in Sausalito, named Best of the Bay 2012, in its second year of operation. She is the co-founder and co-director of StoryFarm, a creative nonfiction cooperative and incubator member of the Intersection For the Arts. She is a fiction editor for the literary journal Prick of the Spindle, for which she also reviews books. Peg is a freelance editor, copy editor, and writing coach.
She teaches writing at the College of Marin, Book Passage, StoryFarm, and in private workshops (North Bay Writers Groups). She has a BA in education and her teaching has been honored with several awards and fellowships including a National Endowment for the Humanities Independent Study Fellow.
You can get in touch via the contact page. You can also sign up for her newsletter, described by one writer as "the best email I receive all month," here.
*photo credit Adam Karsten
Her poetry has appeared in the English Journal (honorable mention) and the Live Poets Society IV anthology. She is a former board member of the Marin Poetry Center and serves as MPC's current newsletter editor.
She also serves on the advisory board of Litquake, on the advisory board of TEDxMarin, and as a director on the board of the California Writers Club-Marin. She's the recipient of one of the Northern Bohemian's Boho Awards 2012 honoring the arts.
Peg founded and curates Why There Are Words, a monthly literary reading series in Sausalito, named Best of the Bay 2012, in its second year of operation. She is the co-founder and co-director of StoryFarm, a creative nonfiction cooperative and incubator member of the Intersection For the Arts. She is a fiction editor for the literary journal Prick of the Spindle, for which she also reviews books. Peg is a freelance editor, copy editor, and writing coach.
She teaches writing at the College of Marin, Book Passage, StoryFarm, and in private workshops (North Bay Writers Groups). She has a BA in education and her teaching has been honored with several awards and fellowships including a National Endowment for the Humanities Independent Study Fellow.
You can get in touch via the contact page. You can also sign up for her newsletter, described by one writer as "the best email I receive all month," here.
*photo credit Adam Karsten
