Dr Constance Squires will be giving her only Swansea public reading and book signing in the Taliesin Cafe at 5pm next Tuesday, March 17th.

Dr Squires, whose acclaimed debut novel Along the Watchtower  won the 2012 Oklahoma Fiction Award, is the first participant in a new teaching exchange between Swansea and the University of Central Oklahoma.

She will be working with the Creative Writing team in the  Department of English Literature and Language. Later this year, the University's Dr Anne Lauppe-Dunbar will go to Oklahoma for a brief teaching period at UCO. 

D J Britton, Associate Professor on the Creative Writing Programme in the English Department at Swansea University said: "Dr Squires' writing is funny, moving and dramatic, and her reading promises to be a rich and entertaining experience."  

Dr Squires' fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Dublin Quarterly and Eclectica among many others, and has been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, named among Story South’s Million Writers Award Notable Stories, and twice nominated for Best New American Voices.

She has won the Matt Clark Prize for Fiction,  the Bob Shacochis Award for the Short Story, and The Briar Cliff Review  Fiction Award.  Recent nonfiction has appeared in The Village Voice  and on the NPR program “Snap Judgment.” Scholarly work has appeared in The Philological Review, and she has also published a textbook for English Composition and Research. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Oklahoma State University and teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at UCO.

Along the Watchtower:

"Set against the closing years of the Cold War, Constance Squires’s debut novel introduces the family of Army Major Jack Collins, through the eyes of his headstrong eldest daughter Lucinda. While Major Collins defends his country from its foreign enemies, Lucinda must learn to steel herself against the chasms in her family, the strict regiments of life on a base, and her growing feelings of displacement and isolation. Finding her own tribe through rock and roll, she meets fellow Army brats, GI’s, a Nazi ghost, and Syd, who knows how it goes. But after her father’s final shocking betrayal, the only world she’s ever believed in falls like the Berlin Wall, leaving Lucinda to chart a new path.

In spare, heart-wrenchingly beautiful prose, Constance Squires offers us a rare glimpse into the experiences and sacrifices of an American military family. Along the Watchtower is a powerful story, vibrant and soaring, that reveals what it truly means to fight for the things we believe in and to defend the ones we love."

For details of Connie's writing, and for more on Along the Watchtower, go to www.constancesquires.com