Andrew Milward

Andrew Milward is the author of two short story collections, I Was a Revolutionary and The Agriculture Hall of Fame, as well as a book of narrative nonfiction called Jayhawker: On History, Home, and Basketball. All three books are set in Kansas, where he grew up, and are rooted in history, politics, and place. 

During his residency, he plans to continue exploring some of these themes in a new collection of short fiction called The Sporting Life, which will look at the intersection of sport with public and private life in the American South. From cockfighting in Louisiana to tailgating culture in Alabama, from African American race car drivers in Mississippi to horseplayers in Kentucky, from to war-veteran hunting therapy groups in Georgia to elite tennis academies for child prodigies in Florida, from semi-pro wrestling in Tennessee to Cherokee stickball in North Carolina, these stories hope to limn the region’s relationship to sport, which is always fraught with the complexities of race, class, gender, and sexuality, as well as the real world affairs and politics of the past and present.  

A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Milward has served as the McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, and has received fellowships and awards from the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Corporation of Yaddo. Formerly the Editor-in-Chief of Mississippi Review, he lives in Lexington, Kentucky, where he is an associate professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Kentucky.