Nona Caspers migrated to San Francisco from rural Minnesota and is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. Her recent book of stories, HEAVIER THAN AIR (University of Massachusetts Press) won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review. Caspers' stories have been widely published in literary journals and anthologies; she has received an Iowa Fiction Award from the Iowa Review, a Cooper Prize from the Ontario Review, a Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award, and a Barbara Demming Memorial Award. She is the author of The Blessed and another book of nonfiction prose is forthcoming in 2008, Little Book of Days, from Spuyten Duyvil (SD) Press, NY.

Contact: ncaspers at sfsu.edu

"Many of Caspers's stories are set in Minnesota's cattle and dairy country, and all of them traffic in the kind of Midwestern realism that doesn't rely on pyrotechnics to generate dramatic heat. Throughout, Caspers's people—it's difficult to consider some of them mere characters—question the decisions they've made or the ones they refuse to make. There's nothing flashy about Caspers's prose; like the beauty of the prairie itself, its attraction lies in details seen close up."

—New York Times Book Review

"In several stories, the simplest acts -- even just noticing one's breath -- become wondrous moments that push characters past anguish to reclaim their "bright, insistent, blooming" lives. Darkly funny, compassionate, and unsentimental, these quiet stories offer memorable, rarely seen views of Midwestern life."

—Booklist

“Revving up Willa Cather's naturalism and lesbian undertones with Denis Johnson's deadpan Plains rowdiness, these are tales of wild but not wild-eyed girls and women as likely to be enraptured by the girl next door as by the lay of the land. The prose is exact, unsparing, unsentimental… Caspers's pungent voice, her fairness to city and country mores, and the artful arrangement of her tales reward rereading.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“In the story ‘Vegetative States’ one of the characters says, ‘I stand at my Auntie Jenny’s hospital bed and watch her breathe. That’s all she has to do— makes living look easy.’ The quiet, honest stories in make writing look easy. Like the ideal Midwesterners of the imagination, the stories are powerful and true without ever drawing undue attention to themselves. To read them is to be lulled into deceptively simple narratives only to have your heart broken in the end. The collection is full of characters poised between themselves and the other, caught in moments that reveal the bare essence of what they—and we—have been looking for all along. Simply beautiful.”

—Ana Menendez, author of Loving Che, and When I Was in Cuba I was a German Shepherd

“Nona Caspers’ Heavier than Air is that rare book of short stories that seems larger and more expansive than the form. In it she captures whole worlds at the moment of rupture: farm girls and fathers in love with the wrong people; lives lost to AIDS; men driven to insanity by the pressures of the economy; women straying from religion into mad ness—people on farms and in big cities alike finding their lives entirely changed. And in that turmoil is Nona Caspers’ steady, unfailing eye and ear, capturing what we need to hold to.”

—Maxine Chernoff, author of Boy in Winter and Signs of Devotion

“These stories are beautiful and devastating and relentless. The quality and originality of language and wide range of subject matter are maintained throughout. What seems at first like quiet Midwestern ‘domestic fiction’ gradually and inevitably moves into extreme emotional and mental territory as a result of love and desire.”

—Wendy Brenner, author of Large Animals in Everyday Life and Calls from the Dead

“Few writers stare down the perils of love, in all its myriad forms, as honestly and with as much intensity as Nona Caspers. The stories in Heavier than Air are classic, beautiful, and so achingly felt that you will feel as though you’ve lived them yourself.”

—Peter Orner, Lannon Literary Award Winner and author of Esther Stories and Second Coming of Mavala Shokingo

In most of my courses we look closely at published texts to absorb craft possibilities and we look closely at student works-in-progress. I emphasize reading for the consciousness of the material and what is on the page: strong and in motion. From this place we offer developmental feedback that stirs up the writer’s imagination in concrete ways. One of the best ways to learn how to develop your work is to practice helping another develop their work. I’m interested in the material in front of us and equally interested in how that material and our practice can encourage us to become more generous thinkers and creators.

• Art of Short Fiction
• MFA Fiction Workshop
• Uses of Time in Fiction
• Art of Narrative (Cross Genre)
• Faculty Advisor Transfer Magazine
• Writing into Dailiness: Aesthetics of the Everyday (Cross Genre)

• The Sonoma County Book Festival
• University of Massachusetts Press
• SFSU's home page