Amy Knox Brown
Photo by B.A. Koontz
Bio
Amy Knox Brown is the author of a story collection, Three Versions of the Truth (Press53); a poetry chapbook, Advice from Household Gods (Longleaf Press); and What Is Gone (Texas Tech University Press), which received the 2018 Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction: Memoir. Individual essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative, Crab Orchard Review, Chest, and other journals. She holds an MFA from North Carolina State University, a JD from the Nebraska College of Law, and a PhD in English/creative writing from the University of Nebraska—Lincoln.
A fourth-generation Nebraskan, she is the assistant reporter of decisions for the Nebraska Supreme Court and lives in Lincoln with her husband and their pack of animals.
On October 30, a Wednesday, I was standing outside the Nebraska state capitol when I returned a call from Katy Day, literary arts specialist with the National Endowment for the Arts. As I watched state senators and citizens and office workers coming up the wide walkway to the building’s east entrance, the men’s ties flapping in gusts of wind, Katy told me I’d received one of the 2020 Literature Fellowship in Prose. I was momentarily shocked into speechlessness: what words could sufficiently express my surprise and gratitude?
I am honored and humbled to be among so many writers I’ve admired. Beyond the generous financial support, the NEA fellowship provides affirmation for the project I’ve been working on—one I wasn’t sure would be of interest to anyone besides the writer herself. Hanging On: A Memoir of Objects, Grudges, and Family Secrets documents the challenges my sister and I face as we clear our parents’ home of 50 years of accumulation, and the book explores the meaning of stuff—the things we keep, why we keep them, and what they mean (who, for instance, is the lovely girl in a photograph hidden in my father’s dresser, with this message on the back: “Larry, may all our days together be happy ones”? And what about the quilted bed jacket, carefully wrapped and packed away in the corner of the attic, a stain on its collar that might be blood?). The fellowship has given me the confidence and inspiration to complete a manuscript that is worthy of this honor, and I am grateful beyond words.