Read the Full Interview (.PDF)
Return to Author Interviews

A native of West Virginia, Ann Pancake is the author of a short story collection, Given Ground, winner of the 2000 Bakeless Fiction Prize, and last year’s novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, which, according to Rick Bass, “crackles with this century’s great white background noise of loss, greed and dishonesty.” Pinckney Benedict refers to Pancake as a writer “who sees with a lover’s generous heart, with a prophet’s steel-hard gaze.” Pancake’s rhythmic prose creates what she calls “background music” to her stories. Rooted in her Appalachian heritage, her fiction weaves precise language with vivid attention to place and complexity of character.

Ann Pancake graduated summa cum laude from West Virginia University, obtained her MA in English from the University of North Carolina, and earned a PhD in English from the University of Washington. She has taught in Japan, American Samoa, and Thailand, and her numerous publishing credits include The Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Glimmer Train, Antietam Review, Quarterly West and New Stories From the South. She’s been awarded a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in Fiction, a Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writers’ Fellowship Grant, the 2003 Whiting Award, the Glasgow Prize, and fellowships from the states of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington.

Ms. Pancake currently lives in Seattle and teaches creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program. We met with her at Bluefish Restaurant in Spokane.