Education

Nixon attended the University of California, Irvine

University of California, Irvine

The University of California, Irvine , founded in 1965, is one of the ten campuses of the University of California, located in Irvine, California, USA...

 where she earned her B.A.

Bachelor of Arts

A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...

. She received an M.F.A. from San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...

 and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

.

Career

Nixon served as a teacher at Indiana University

Indiana University

Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

 in Bloomington, Indiana

Bloomington, Indiana

Bloomington is a city in and the county seat of Monroe County in the southern region of the U.S. state of Indiana. The population was 80,405 at the 2010 census....

 from 1981 to 2000. Nixon joined the faculty at Mills College

Mills College

Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded...

 in Oakland, California

Oakland, California

Oakland is a major West Coast port city on San Francisco Bay in the U.S. state of California. It is the eighth-largest city in the state with a 2010 population of 390,724...

 in 2000 and continues to teach there today.

Nixon's first book was Lawrence's Leadership Politics and the Turn Against Women a critical essay that examined what Nixon felt to be the negative portrayal of women in D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence

David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...

's Women in Love.

In 1991, Nixon authored Now You See It, a novel in stories.

Nixon's next literary work was published in 2000. Angels Go Naked is a collection of interrelated short stories that together form a larger narrative. It was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review

The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...

. Jarrettsville is Nixon's most recent novel and was released October 1, 2009. It has been reviewed, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, San Francisco Magazine.

Nixon has also contributed to several periodicals such as the New England Review

New England Review

The New England Review is a quarterly literary magazine published by Middlebury College. Founded in New Hampshire in 1978 by poet, novelist, editor and professor Sydney Lea and poet Jay Parini, it was published as New England Review & Bread Loaf Quarterly from 1982 , until 1991 as a formal...

, the Iowa Review and Ploughshares

Ploughshares

Ploughshares is an American literary magazine founded in 1971 by DeWitt Henry and Peter O'Malley in The Plough and Stars, an Irish pub in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since 1989, Ploughshares has been based at Emerson College in the heart of Boston...

.

Awards

• The 2010 Michael Shaara Prize for Excellence in Civil War Fiction, awarded to her novel Jarrettsville
• First Prize O. Henry Award 1995
• O. Henry Award 1993
• Nelson Algren Award, Chicago Tribune (1988)
• Carl Sandburg Award in Fiction (1991)
• National Endowment for the Arts (1992)
• Pushcart Prizes in 1995 and 2003
• Carnegie Fellowship to the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe 1986-87

Anthologies

• Prize Stories 1995: The O. Henry Awards, First Prize Winner. Ed. William Abrahams, Doubleday, 1995.
• Pushcart Prize XX: Best of the Small Presses (1995). Ed. Bill Henderson. Pushcart Press.
• Modern American Bestsellers, Moscow (in Russian), 2002.
• The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. Ed. Vendela Vida. McSweeney's Press, 2007.

External links

• Cornelia Nixon at the Biography Resource Center
• Contributions by Cornelia Nixon at Ploughshares
• http://find.galegroup.com/gvrl/retrieve.do?contentSet=EBKS&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale(en%2C%2C)%3AFQE%3D(KE%2CNone%2C14)cornelia+nixon%24&sgHitCountType=None&inPS=true&sort=Relevance&searchType=BasicSearchForm&tabID=T001&prodId=GVRL&searchId=R1¤tPosition=1&userGroupName=athe17405&docId=CX2654014350&docType=EBKS&contentSet=EBKSCornelia Nixon at the Gale Virtual Reference Library]