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A former college instructor of all forms of written communication except Braille...
Marlis Manley Broadhead has award-winning short stories and more than 100 poems in literary magazines—including Kansas Quarterly, Mikrokosmos, Crosscurrents, and Kansas Women Writers. Her debut historic novel, TROPHY GIRL, published by Black Rose Writing, was awarded the William Faulkner second prize in 2018.
While still in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas, where she earned her MFA, she started the Learning Skills Center at the Vo-Tech School for refugees from the Viet Nam war—located on the campus of her alma mater, Wichita High School East.
In 1981, she and her family moved to Iowa State University where she taught business Communications and worked for Better Homes and Garden’s building department. Thanks to the development of fax machines, she took that editing job to northern California. There she taught a variety of writing classes at College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg, California (gazing over her students’ heads at the Pacific Ocean).
She also founded the annual Mendocino Coast Writers Conference, MCWC.com, (still going), started Good Neighbors, a homeless shelter (a disaster eventually), formed the Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund (still thriving), and steered Fort Bragg Center for the Arts—a public showcase for local artists--who outnumber regular folks out there five to one.
Her second novel—HOLE IN THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY, about a secretly homeless socialite--is with a NY agent, and she's working on two more manuscripts, HAVING IT ALL--about an empty nester keen on discovering what else is in store for her personally just as her nest refills with five generations--and PAPER BOATS--about refugees from the Viet Nam war coming together at a learning skill center at a vocational-technical school to rebuild their lives.
She is also preparing a chap book, THE MENDOCINO POEMS, and serializing her stories on Amazon Kindle Vella in the brave new world of social media. To sign up for her newsletter MUSINGS & MIRTH and see more of her work, visit https://linktr.ee/marlismanley. You can find her blog at heartlandstoriesandpoems.blogspot.com.
Back home in Kansas, she lives with her husband and a small menagerie on a modest horse ranch just south of Kansas City.
Honors and Awards
· Honored at 2023 Annual Kansas Author’s Dinner
· William Faulkner Literary Contest, 2018, 2nd Place for novel Trophy Girl
· Marlis Manley Broadhead Scholarship, Mendocino Coast Writers Conference
· Finalist, Nimrod Fiction Contest (19 finalists among 714 entrants)
· Second Seaton Award for Fiction, Kansas Quarterly
· M.F.A. Fellow in Fiction, Wichita State University
· Honorable Mention, Sixth Annual National Playwriting Contest, Wichita State University
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