Patricia Ann McNair

Patricia Ann McNair has lived 95 percent of her life in the Midwest. She’s managed a gas station, served as a medical volunteer in Honduras, sold pots and pans door to door, tended bar, breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and taught aerobics. Associate Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago, McNair was nominated for the Carnegie Foundation U.S. Professor of the Year. She has facilitated adult writing workshops on line and in person, and has served on the faculty of the Yale Writers’ Workshop. She left Chicago winters behind to enjoy retirement with her husband, visual artist Philip Hartigan, in a small town in Spain. They live in a slightly crumbling historic house at the bottom of a mountain beneath an ancient castle.

McNair’s first collection of short stories, The Temple of Air, has been re-issued in 2024 as a second edition with new stories and content. Originally published in 2011, The Temple of Air won the Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award, Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Readers Award in Fiction, and was a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award in Adult Fiction. Her second story collection, Responsible Adults, was selected for the Legacy Series in Short Fiction by Cornerstone Press and was named a Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Awards. And These Are the Good Times, McNair’s essay collection, was a Montaigne Medal finalist.

Patricia Ann McNair’s fiction and nonfiction work has received numerous Illinois Arts Council Awards and has been published in a variety of textbooks, anthologies, magazines, and journals, including American Fiction: Best Unpublished Short Stories by Emerging Writers; LitHub; The Rumpus; Barrelhouse; Hypertext; Superstition Review; River Teeth; Fourth Genre; Brevity; Creative Nonfiction, and others. Her short story, “My Mother’s Daughter,” was selected as the winner of Solstice Literary Magazine’s prize in short fiction.

Contact: patriciaannmcnairauthor@gmail.com