Assistant Professor Francis Davis was born and raised in Philadelphia, but has lived most of his adult life in the West. He has an M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Montana and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska. His interests include the contemporary short story and novel, and American working-class literature. He teaches college writing, creative writing, and literature. A finalist for the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, he’s published a collection of short stories, West of Love, and his stories have appeared in Story, Natural Bridge, and Weber: The Contemporary West, among many other publications. He’s also worked as a journalist throughout the state of Montana, and he’s earned writing fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Some of his favorite writers are Ray Carver, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Pete Dexter, Paul Auster, Mary Gaitskill, Haruki Murakami, and Karl Ove Knausgaard.
