M.O. Walsh

Area of Specialty: Fiction

M.O. Walsh was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He has spent his entire adult life in the American South, from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to the lakes of Mississippi to the hot green lawns of Louisiana, and would not want it any other way.  Besides writing, his main interests are being fanatical about seemingly unimportant things like collegiate sports and dust jackets, fishing for bass and speckled trout, and trying to find the best boxed wine on the planet.  He is also madly in love with his beautiful wife and genius daughter, which takes up a lot of time when you think about it.

His fiction ranges somewhat wildly from Magical Realism to traditional Southern storytelling to 2nd person Fabulism, while he is admittedly not certain what those terms mean. His first book,  The Prospect of Magic was published in 2010 by Livingston Press as winner of the Tartt’s First Fiction Prize.  Described by The Southern Literary Review as a book “so vivid…it brings Louisiana to life in a way that no [book] has done before…”  The Prospect of Magic was a named an Editor’s Pick for Best Books of 2010 by Oxford American and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award for General Fiction.

His other essays and stories have appeared in  The New York Times, American Short Fiction,  American Book Review,  Epoch,  Oxford American, Story South and  LitnImage, among others, and have been anthologized in Best New American Voices,  Best of the Net,  Louisiana in Words and  Bar Stories. Two separate stories have been named “Notable Stories of the Year” by The Million Writers Award (2007 & 2010) and his story “The Vicinity of the Sick” was named a Top Ten Story of 2010 by the international culture magazine Flavorwire.com.

He is currently at work on a novel entitled  Whiteflies, the first 50 pages of which won the 2010 William Faulkner-William Wisdom Prize for a Novel in Progress.  His short film adaptation of his short story “The Freddies” also won the First Annual Louisiana Arts and Film Commission Screenwriting Contest and will begin filming this winter.