Moore, Phyllis

PERSONAL: Female. Education: Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES: Office—Kansas City Art Institute, 4415 Warwick Blvd., Kansas City, MO 64111. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: School of the Art Institute, Chicago, former teacher and cochair of M.F.A. program; Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO, associate professor and director of the School of Liberal Arts, 2003–.

AWARDS, HONORS: Grants from the states of Illinois and Florida.

WRITINGS:

A Compendium of Skirts (short stories), Carroll & Graf (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Georgia Review, Mississippi Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Redbook.

SIDELIGHTS: A professor and short-story writer, Phyllis Moore released her first work of fiction, A Compendium of Skirts, in 2002. A collection of tales previously published in magazines and literary journals, the book features women protagonists and their various relationships with men, women, and family members. Commenting that Moore's writing is "reminiscent of 1960s rebel fiction that is often simultaneously cynical and ingenuous," Patricia Gulian in Library Journal felt that the author's technique can sometimes seem "dated without purpose." A Kirkus Reviews contributor similarly felt that, although the stories all share in common "young, bright, frustrated women," the collection as a whole is "loose, tentative, and without clear point: debut stories that add up to very little in the end." On the other hand, a Publishers Weekly reviewer called A Compendium of Skirts a "promising debut." The critic especially praised the lengthy "A History of Pandas," the story of one woman's admiration for her widowed sister, which the reviewer described as "a flawless exercise in characterization."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2002, review of A Compendium of Skirts, p. 911.

Library Journal, September 15, 2002, Patricia Gulian, review of A Compendium of Skirts, p. 95.

Publishers Weekly, July 22, 2002, review of A Compendium of Skirts, p. 158.