M.A., University of Tennessee | M.F.A., University of Mississippi

Area of Specialty: Fiction 

Books: The Big Door Prize (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), My Sunshine Away (G.P. Putnam’s Sons) and The Prospect of Magic (Livingston Press).  Essays and stories in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Oxford American and others.

M.O. Walsh is a Professor of Fiction and currently serves as the Director of The Creative Writing Workshop MFA program at UNO.  He is the author of three books. His first book, the short story collection The Prospect of Magic, was the winner of the Tartt's First Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award for General Fiction. 

His novel My Sunshine Away was a New York Times Bestseller, an Amazon Featured Debut, and an NPR Top 100 book of 2015. It also won the Pat Conroy Book Prize for Fiction.   Foreign editions have been published in the UK, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Brazil, Israel, Serbia, Turkey, South Korea and Hungary.  Of the book, the novelist Tom Franklin says, "My Sunshine Away is that rarest find, a page-turner you want to read slowly and a literary novel you can't look away from. At times funny, at times spine-tinglingly suspenseful and at times just flat-out wise, this novel is also a meditation on memory, how it can destroy or damn us but redeem us as well. It's a book to read and reread, one that will only get better with time..."  The Kirkus Review says "Celebrate fiction lovers: The Gods of Southern Gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member."

His second novel, The Big Door Prize was a finalist for the Thurber Award for American Humor and has since been adapted for television by the Emmy winning writer of Schitt's Creek, David West Read. It is currently streaming on Apple TV.  Walsh serves as a Producer on the show.