Chris Harding Thornton

After graduating from UNO’s Writer’s Workshop, Chris Harding Thornton received an M.F.A. from University of Washington in Seattle and a Ph.D. in English from University of Nebraska—Lincoln. In recent years, she's served as a writing consultant to graduate students and faculty at UNO, and at UNL, she has taught first-year and advanced courses in composition, fiction writing, literary theory, Shakespeare, women’s literature in English, and courses in the American short story. Her poetry has appeared in Tampa Review and Baltimore Review, her creative nonfiction (about creative nonfiction) has appeared in Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, and a chapbook of her short stories was released in 2019 by Omaha record label DoomTown U.S.A. While being a seventh-generation Nebraskan informs much of her work, so do several decades spent working in independent music, and she continues to craft bios and promotional copy for an array of established and emerging recording artists. Her first novel, Pickard County Atlas, was a finalist for the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellowships, received a Vreeland Award from UNL, and was short-listed for the First Novel Prize 2018. The book was released by MCD/FSG, a subsidiary of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, in January 2021. She is currently at work on a second novel.