Alyssa Knickerbockers’ answer to Katerina Stoykova-Klemer’s question: “What is the most important thing you teach your students?” Clip from Accents radio show on 6/28/2013. Complete show can be heard here.

“Alyssa Knickerbocker is a writer and teacher living in a cold beach cottage on the Kitsap Peninsula in Washington state, where she’s working on a novel set in the area, revising a collection of linked short stories, and ordering firewood by the cord.

Her fiction appears or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch, Five Chapters, American Short Fiction, The Carolina Quarterly, Brooklyn Magazine, and Meridian, among many others, and has been anthologized in The Best of the West 2011: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. A novella, Your Rightful Home, is published by Nouvella Books, which puts out gorgeous chapbooks by new and emerging writers (check them out here!).

She recently held the Halls Emerging Artist Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing (2012-2013) and the Axton Fellowship in Fiction at the University of Louisville (2010-2012) where she developed and directed the 2012 Axton literary festival, ”The Time Machine: Exploring the Past & Future in Fiction & Poetry.”

She earned an MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she received the David & Jean Milofsky Prize in fiction and a full scholarship to the New York Summer Writer’s Institute.” – http://alyssaknix.com/