Biography
Roderick Townley has published over a dozen books, comprising poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and literary criticism. The Sylvie Cycle, his trilogy of middle grade novels, has been widely praised and appears in several foreign editions, as well as in large print and audio versions. He has also written two young adult novels, Sky (Atheneum, 2004), and The Red Thread: A Novel in Three Incarnations (Atheneum, 2007).
Mr. Townley taught in Chile on a Fulbright scholarship, worked in New York as an editor, and now writes from his home in Kansas. Along the way, he has won a number of honors, including the Peregrine Prize for Short Fiction, the Thorpe Menn Award, the Kansas Arts Commission Fellowship in Fiction, the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award, and First Prize in two contests sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. His novel, The Great Good Thing (the first volume in The Sylvie Cycle), was a Top Ten Book Sense Pick and has been optioned for film.
Townley continues to write poetry, publishing his work in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, The North American Review, and other journals.
Mr. Townley has two children, Jesse and Grace, and is married to poet and yoga instructor Wyatt Townley.
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