PrairieLights – A Reading with Matthew Neill Null, Floodgate

Writers’ Workshop graduate Matthew Neill Hull will read from his new novel, Floodgate. Described by publisher Blair as a story about “a former West Virginia coal miner [who] encounters corruption and cultural upheaval working on a dam project that will submerge his town,” Floodgate is praised by Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Night Watch, as ” a masterpiece and a saga,” while Rita Bullwinkel, author of Headshot, says: “A lushly rendered, politically radical novel that illuminates not only the American past, but also our present.”

A writer from West Virginia, Matthew Neill Null is author of the novel Honey from the Lion, the story collection Allegheny Front, and, most recently, the novel Floodgate. He is recipient of the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Mary McCarthy Prize, and the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and his short fiction has appeared in Electric Literature, Oxford American, The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, and the Missouri Review, among other journals. He has been a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, the University of Iowa, and the American Academy in Rome, as well as a resident at Yaddo and the Jentel Foundation, and his books have been published in translation in France and Italy. National Book Award-winner Jaimy Gordon writes, “Matthew Neill Null is bound to become one of the most admired and influential fiction writers of his generation.” Booklist said about Null’s debut novel, “Beautifully written in fresh, lyrical prose, Honey from the Lion brilliantly creates a land and a people experiencing tremendous change. Null successfully and engagingly presents the consequences of this change for both humans and the environment, leaving readers feeling like witnesses to it all.” He currently is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Susquehanna University and a member of the Writing Committee at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.