Contact: Sarah Nicholas
STARKVILLE, Miss.—Mississippi State University Professor of English Becky Hagenston is offering signed copies of “The Age of Discovery and Other Stories” at the book’s official launch Wednesday [Aug. 11] at Munson and Brothers Trading Post in Columbus.
Hosted by Friendly City Books, the 5:30 p.m. event includes a featured reading by Hagenston, a 2020 Pushcart Prize winner. She also will sign copies of her new book, published this year by The Ohio State University Press/Mad Creek Books.
The Journal, Ohio State’s award-winning literary magazine, awarded “The Age of Discovery and Other Stories” its Non/Fiction Collection Prize, presented annually to a book-length collection of short stories, essays, or a combination of the two.
The Ohio State University Press said Hagenston’s book creates a space where “the real and the fantastic collide in stories that span from Mississippi to Europe, and from the recent past to the near future. In these stories, men and women confront grief, danger, loneliness and sometimes—the strangest discovery of all—unexpected joy.”
“I didn’t know where any of these stories were headed when I started them, and they ended up in some pretty weird places that involve robots, witches and magical sourdough,” Hagenston said. “That’s what I love most about writing stories—seeing where they take me.”
An MSU faculty member since 2001, Hagenston won the 2020 Pushcart Prize for her 2018 short story “Hi Ho Cherry-O.” She also has authored three award-winning story collections—“Scavengers,” Permafrost Book Prize; “Strange Weather,” Spokane Prize in Short Fiction; and “A Gram of Mars,” Sarabande Books’ Mary McCarthy Prize.
Hagenston is the recipient of two O. Henry Awards, the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, the Reynolds Price Award in Short Fiction, and the Julia Peterkin Award.
Her work is published in journals including the Oxford American, New England Review, Southern Review and Gettysburg Review.
A Maryland native, Hagenston earned a bachelor’s degree from Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona and master’s from New Mexico State University.
Part of MSU’s College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English is online at www.english.msstate.edu.
MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.