English: Anna Keesey

Anna Keesey is a graduate of Stanford University and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Her novel Little Century, set in central Oregon at the turn of the 20th century, was published to much acclaim this summer by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including Best American Short Stories.  She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and has held residencies at MacDowell, Bread Loaf, Yaddo, and Provincetown.  Keesey teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.

Little Century has been favorably reviewed in the NY Times Sunday Book Review, O Magazine, and many other venues.

“Little Century . . . is rendered vividly through fluid and restrained prose, solid plotting and a keen eye for detail . . . Keesey, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, treads [her] territory competently, imbuing her characters with palpable motives, rich contradictions and fully realized pasts. She also stays atop the rising action of the story, upping the stakes for her characters and the town of Century as she herds us efficiently toward the conclusion. At the same time, she knows not to hurry readers along without letting them soak up the atmosphere. The real star of the novel is Oregon’s high desert, a vast, quiet plain Keesey captures in many of its dynamic moods, in language ranging from the plainspoken to the elegant . . . [Keesey’s] language serves the story admirably, rarely crossing the line into the self-conscious, the sentimental or the flashy. In short, Keesey is a sentence writer in control of her craft. She’s a storyteller who stays out of her own way.” —Jonathan Evison, The New York Times Book Review



“[A] briskly romantic, nontraditional Western . . . It’s Willa Cather with a sense of humor . . . Keesey portrays her men and women as deeply flawed but so achingly vulnerable that it is impossible not to identify with them.” —Liza Nelson, O: The Oprah Magazine



“Keesey writes lyrically and examines the ferocity of frontier life with an unromantic and penetrating voice.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)