Randolph adds 2018 Whiting Award winner to M.F.A. program faculty

Patty Yumi Cottrell (photo by Beowulf Sheehan)

Another nationally known, award-winning author is the newest member of the faculty for Randolph College’s new M.F.A. in creative writing program.

Patty Yumi Cottrell, a fiction/nonfiction writer and winner of the 2018 Whiting Award for emerging writers, joins the program, which starts this summer. Cottrell’s first novel, Sorry To Disrupt the Peace, was long-listed for the Times Literary Supplement’s Republic of Consciousness Prize, and is the winner of the Best First Book–Fiction 2017 National Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. It also earned Barnes & Noble’s 2017 Discover Award for Fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, and other publications.

Cottrell was born in Korea and raised in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Milwaukee. She has taught at Pratt Institute and at Columbia University. She holds an M.F.A. degree from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Cottrell joins an already stellar lineup of faculty including Kaveh Akbar, Erika L. Sánchez, Mira Jacob, Kaitlyn Greenidge, Aviya Kushner, Layli Long Soldier, and Philip B. Williams.

For more information about Randolph’s M.F.A. in creative writing program, please visit http://mfa.randolphcollege.edu/.