Lawrence Coates
Lawrence Coates has worked as a Third Mate in the Merchant Marine, as a freelance journalist in Mexico, and as a high school teacher in Paris. Born in Berkeley, California, he served four years in the Coast Guard and another four in the Merchant Marine, spending time in the North Atlantic
, the Hawaiian Island chain, and in the Arabian Sea during the Iranian Hostage Crisis. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz and gained fluency in Spanish while studying abroad in Barcelona, Spain. He taught in the Lycée Charlemagne in Paris after completing a master's degree at Berkeley, and went on to earn his doctorate at the University of Utah.
He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in Fiction, and his work has appeared in The Chicago Tribune, The Missouri Review, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. His first novel, The Blossom Festival, won the Western States Book Award for Fiction, and was selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. His second novel, The Master of Monterey, was published in 2003. His third novel, The Garden of the World, will be published in 2012.
After several years at Southern Utah University, Coates currently is Director of Creative Writing at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.
