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Matthew Neill Null is a recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Mary McCarthy Prize, the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the MichenerCopernicus Society of America Award. His stories appear in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, Ecotone, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Electric Literature, The PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories, and The Best American Mystery Stories. A native of West Virginia, he holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His novel, Honey from the Lion (Lookout, 2015), was short listed for the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and his story collection, Allegheny Front (Sarabande, 2016), was named a finalist for Foreword's INDIE collection of the year. He teaches at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, and lives in central Pennsylvania.
""Matthew Neill Null's Floodgate is a masterpiece and a saga, a novel of torrent, flood control, and the fifty years before and beyond the mighty Summersville Dam flooded parts of five counties, erasing histories and species under thousands of acres of water. The dam's gargantuan lake saved the polluting, industrial businesses downriver and spawned a white-water rafting tourist mecca, but Floodgate tells the truth inside the sinewy lie of history: local men hired and fired by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, cost overruns, deaths and injuries, the agonal guilt of ex-miners building a future that requires the death of the past, and their haunted, stalwart women who won't let go. Read Floodgate for Null's gorgeous, flint-hard, shining language, and for the lost worlds--villages and mining camps bulldozed and drowned; freshwater creeks whose native mussels (Rabbitsfoot, Pink Mucket, Pondhorn) die first; legions of giant oaks become treetop islands; perched, isolate birds watching the water; hundreds of graves torn up and moved. No wonder souls are set free to shush and sigh in the waters, I'm with you. All us, we're with you. Floodgate is unforgettable, exhilarating, terrifying.""--Jayne Anne Phillips, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Night Watch Praise for Matthew Neill Null's Honey from the Lion: ""Lyrical, quietly powerful debut novel...Against a backdrop of labor unrest and the growing destruction of the old-growth forest, Null weaves a morality play of many threads: who will betray whom and at what price? The writing is exact and assured, the story complex and rewarding. Fans of John Sayles's film Matewan will find this a kindred work and just as good.""--Kirkus, One of Nine Books You Shouldn't Overlook ""Award-winning short story author Null writes with an eye for the geography, players, and violent push of the Gilded Age profit engines...A debut of note for fans of historical fiction, labor, or environmental issues, and Appalachian settings; read-alike authors include Denis Johnson and E.L. Doctorow.""--Library Journal, Summer Best Debuts Praise for Null's story collection, Allegheny Front: ""Remarkable...A cleareyed look at an area that has been torn apart for more than a century...Together these stories show the human and natural calamity that follows when an entire region is seen merely as a resource...Null never yields to nihilism, but captures the rich and complex, if imperfect, lives of the dispossessed.""--The New York Times ""Sometimes lyrical, sometimes scarifying stories...Within that setting of crags, foreboding forests, and onrushing creeks, Null finds poetry and moments that can sometimes bear something like grace.""--Kirkus, STARRED review
