Garnett Kilberg Cohen

Garnett Kilberg Cohen has published three collections of short stories, Lost Women, Banished Souls (U of Missouri Press), How We Move the Air (Mayapple Press), Swarm to Glory (Wiseblood Books), and a poetry chapbook, Passion Tour (Finishing Line Press). Her awards include two Notable Essay citations from Best American Essays (2011 and 2015); the Crazyhorse National Fiction Prize (2004); the Lawrence Foundation Prize from Michigan Quarterly Review (2003); and four awards from the Illinois Council of the Arts, including a 2001 Illinois Arts Council Individual Artist's Fellowship for prose. Her essays and short stories have appeared in many publications, including American Fiction, TriQuarterly, The Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Literary Review, Witness, Descant, The Roanoke Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Rumpus, and many others. She has also published poetry in two anthologies, Dorothy Parker's Elbow (Warner Books) and A More Perfect Union (St. Martin's Press), as well as in journals such as Tulane Review, Mid-American Poetry Review, Calyx, and The Maryland Review. In 2016, she was one of the honorees at the Carl Sandburg Awards dinner hosted by the Chicago Public Library and moderated by Bill Kurtis of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. A former fiction editor of The Pennsylvania Review and Hotel Amerika, Garnett has also served as the review editor at Another Chicago Magazine, the former editor-in-chief of The South Loop Review and a visiting Nonfiction editor at Fifth Wednesday. Currently she is a co-editor of Punctuate, A Nonfiction Magazine.

Garnett received her BA, magna cum laude, with honors in English Literature from the University of Cincinnati and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. From 1994 until 2005 she served as the Chairperson of the Department of English at Columbia College Chicago, where she has taught for over 25 years. Prior to assuming the chairpersonship, Garnett directed the college Writing Center. In 2007, she was named a Distinguished Artist at Columbia College Chicago, an honor that lasts for a period of two years.