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Speer Morgan (born January 25, 1946, inFort Smith, Arkansas) is an Americannovelist,short story writer, andeditor.[1][user-generated source?]
His parents were Charles Donald and Betty (Speer) Morgan. Morgan attended theUniversity of the South inSewanee, Tennessee, from 1964 to 1966, as well as theUniversity of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he received a BA in 1968. He received a PhD in 1972 fromStanford University.
Morgan was assistant professor at theUniversity of Missouri inColumbia, Missouri from 1972 to 1978, was associate professor beginning in 1978,[citation needed] and as of 2019[update] is a professor of English and editor ofThe Missouri Review.[2] He also taught at the Moberly Area Junior College (a men's correctional facility) in 1977 and was a member of the literature panel for theNational Endowment for the Arts from 1975 to 1979.
Morgan has been editor-in-chief ofThe Missouri Review, since 1980. He also co-edited ofThe Best of the Missouri Review (University of Missouri Press, 1991) andFor Our Beloved Country: Diaries of Americans in War (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1993). In the mid-1980s, Morgan establishedTMR Online on a commercial site called The Source, making it the first magazine in the world to have an online site.
Morgan has been a visiting writer at theUniversity of Texas, theUniversity of Arkansas, and the Paris Writers Workshop. He currently[when?] lives inColumbia, Missouri, with his wife Kristine, a writer and teacher.
Morgan has won several awards, including the Best Story of the Year award fromPrairie Schooner in 1978, for "Internal Combustion." He was a fiction fellow for theNational Endowment for the Arts in 1994. He won anAmerican Book Award from theBefore Columbus Foundation in 1999 forThe Freshour Cylinders and a Lawrence Foundation Prize in 2000 for "The Girl." His story "The Big Bang" received the Goodheart Prize forShenandoah’s best story of 2008. Morgan has contributed short stories to several other magazines and journals, includingHarper’s, theAtlantic Monthly,Northwest Review,New Letters,River Styx, andIowa Review.
In 2019, Morgan was awarded the Distinguished Literary Achievement Award by the Missouri Humanities Council.
Other awards include: