Shelby Hearon (January 18, 1931 - December 10, 2016) was an American novelist and short story writer.

Early life

Hearon was born in 1931 in

Marion, Kentucky Marion is a home rule-class city in Crittenden County, Kentucky, in the United States. It is the seat of its county. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 3,039. The farm communities surrounding Marion are home to a large Amish popula ...

. She attended the University of Texas at Austin, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in 1953.

Career

''Armadillo in the Grass'', her first novel, was begun in 1962 and accepted for publication by Knopf in 1967. Hearon had a teaching career at several colleges, and served on the

Texas Commission on the Arts Texas (, ; Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2020, it is the second-largest U.S. state by ...

and the New York State Council on the Arts.

Awards and recognition

Hearon has been awarded fiction fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received the Texas Institute of Letters award twice, and a lifetime achievement award from the Texas Book Festival. Five of her short stories were awarded NEA/PEN syndication Short Story Prizes and she received a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship. She has also received a New York Women in Communications Award. Her novel ''Owning Jolene'' won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award.

Bibliography

* ''Armadillo in the Grass'' (1968) * ''The Second Dune'' (1973) * ''Hannah's House'' (1975) * ''Now and Another Time'' (1976) * ''A Prince of a Fellow'' (1978) * ''Barbara Jordan, a self portrait'' (1979) * ''Painted Dresses'' (1981) * ''Afternoon of a Faun'' (1983) * ''Group Therapy'' (1984) * ''A Small Town'' (1985) * ''500 Scorpions'' (1986) * ''Owning Jolene'' (1989) * ''Hug Dancing'' (1991) * ''Life Estates'' (1994) * ''Footprints'' (1996) * ''Ella in Bloom'' (2001) * ''Year of the Dog'' (2007)

References

External links

Shelby Heardon 1931-2016

from The Borzoi Reader
"Laying It All Out: Shelby Hearon Makes an Art of the Little White Lie"
in the ''Austin Chronicle''

* ttp://research.hrc.utexas.edu:8080/hrcxtf/view?docId=ead/00055.xml Inventory of Hearon's papers at Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
Addition to inventory of Hearon's papers at Harry Ransom Center
{{DEFAULTSORT:Hearon, Shelby 1931 births 2016 deaths 20th-century American novelists 21st-century American novelists American women novelists American women short story writers University of Texas at Austin alumni Novelists from Kentucky People from Marion, Kentucky 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers 20th-century American short story writers 21st-century American short story writers Kentucky women writers