Connor Coyne

I earned my MFA from the New School and my BA from the University of Chicago.  My graduate thesis adviser was Jeffery Renard Allen.  That said, I’ve been writing for decades, and as early as 1997 I was a winner of the Young Playwrights, Inc. annual contest, for my play September.  Since then my work has appeared in numerous publications.  My fiction has been published in the Santa Clara Review, Moria Poetry Zine, the Dick Pig Review, the Flint Broadside, and the Saturnine Detractor, and my plays have been performed at the University of Chicago’s University Theater and, once upon a time, at Flint Youth Theatre.  My first novel, Hungry Rats, a teen-noir set in Michigan, will be published in 2010 through the Gothic Funk Press.

I believe that the arts exist in connection with each other, and am a strong advocate of creative collaboration.  In 2004, I cofounded Chicago’s Gothic Funk Nation which currently hosts two reading series, a variety of art installations, performance art, and other events.  The Nation has its own arts journal, The Paramanu Pentaquark, of which I am the editor-in-chief.  I have been a perennial judge for the University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt (and once participated in its successful effort  to build a functional breeder reactor, as reported here by the New York Times), and I’ve been a literary assistant to the Ojai Playwrights Conference, where I worked for director Abigail Deser and playwrights Lee Blessing and Susan Miller.  Over the years, I have also worked with Elisabeth Blair, Richard Whaling, Nova Moturba, the bkish literary blog, the ChiTown Daily News, Forge 22, Front 312, and many others.

Not only do I believe that the arts are fundamentally important to our understanding of history and culture, but that technology is transforming our access to and interaction with the arts.  This change can be a two-way conversation, but only if artists are willing to confront their fears and meet new risks and opportunities head-on.

For more information on my artistic career, or to obtain a chronological resume of my projects, please contact me at connor at connorcoyne dot com.