Wright State faculty member and author Erin Flanagan wins Ohio Arts Council award

Erin Flanagan is an award-winning author and professor of English at Wright State University.

Erin Flanagan, Ph.D., an award-winning author and professor of English at Wright State University, received an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council.

The Individual Excellence Awards program recognizes outstanding accomplishments by artists in a variety of disciplines. Awards allow artists to experiment and explore their art forms, develop skills and advance their careers.

The Ohio Arts Council awarded 75 grants to Ohio artists working in choreography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, music composition, playwriting/screenplays and poetry. This year, nearly 500 applications were submitted by artists across the state.

Flanagan said she is honored and humbled to receive an Individual Excellence Award.

“My submission was the opening of a new novel I’m really nervous and excited about, one I feel I’m pouring my heart into,” she said. “To have it validated in this way means the world. I’m hoping to get to Nebraska this summer to continue research and this grant will make that possible.”

Flanagan won the 2022 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author for her 2021 thriller “Deer Season.” Presented by the Mystery Writers of America, the Edgar Awards celebrate the best mystery fiction, nonfiction and television published or produced each year.

“Deer Season” was also named a finalist for the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery and the Midwest Book Award in Fiction in the Literary/Contemporary/Historical category.

Flanagan followed up “Deer Season” with “Blackout,” which was selected as an Amazon First Reads, in 2022 and “Come with Me” in 2023.

She has also published two collections of short stories: “It’s Not Going to Kill You, and Other Stories” and “The Usual Mistakes.” Her stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Colorado Review, The Southern Review and Prairie Schooner. She has held fellowships with Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, UCross, and the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences.

As a faculty member in the School of Humanities and Cultural Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, Flanagan teaches Introduction to Fiction Writing and Advanced Fiction Writing and special topic courses that include novel writing, narrative time and fiction, and creative nonfiction.

She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English and her Ph.D. in English with a specialization in creative writing from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.