E493 - Phyllis Gobbell - PRODIGAL, a Southern novel that echoes an ancient Biblical story | Living The Next Chapter: Inspiring Conversations with Bestselling Authors and Writing Experts podcast

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Episode description

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Episode description

Episode 493 - Phyllis Gobbell - PRODIGAL, a Southern novel that echoes an ancient Biblical story

Phyllis Gobbell’s writing career spans four decades. Her history of publication includes both fiction and nonfiction, with a total of five novels and over thirty stories and articles in literary journals, anthologies, and magazines. One of her first stories appeared in the anthology, HomeWorks, in 1996, a collection of writings by Tennessee authors living at that time, including Alex Haley, Robert Penn Warren, and Peter Taylor.

Gobbell, a Nashville author, writes a little bit of everything. Two true-crime books, An Unfinished Canvas (Berkley, 2007; Diversion 2020) and A Season of Darkness (Berkley, 2010), are accounts of high-profile, cold-case murders in Nashville. Now Gobbell authors the Jordan Mayfair Mystery Series: Pursuit in Provence (Five Star, 2015), Secrets and Shamrocks (Five Star, 2016), and Treachery in Tuscany (Encircle, 2018), winner of Killer Nashville’s Silver Falchion Award for Best Cozy Mystery.

Gobbell received the Tennessee Arts Commission’s Individual Artist Award in Fiction. Other writing achievements include the Leslie Garrett Fiction Prize awarded by the Knoxville Writers Guild, Tennessee Writers Alliance Short Story First Place Award, and the North Carolina Writers’ Workshop First Place Award in Creative Nonfiction. She received a Pushcart nomination for her story, “Primates,” which was published in Bellevue Literary Review. She won the Creative Nonfiction First Place Award from the Knoxville Writers’ Guild for her essay, “In the Car with Mother on Christmas Eve.” Twice she has received the Leslie Garrett Award for Fiction.

An active participant in the writing community, Gobbell helped organize the Tennessee Writers Alliance in 1990 and served on its Board of Directors for ten years, including two terms as president and one as chair of the Board. She was also a founding member of a writers group that still meets every Tuesday night, the Nashville Writers Alliance.

For twenty years, Phyllis Gobbell served on the English faculty at Nashville State Community College as Associate Professor. She taught courses in composition, creative writing, and literature. She served as editor of the literary magazine, Tetrahedra, for eight years.

Gobbell earned her B.S. in Education at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and received her M.A. in English from Austin Peay State University, Clarksville, Tennessee, where the graduate program offered a creative thesis option. Her thesis was a collection of stories entitled Listen to Me. Most of the stories have been published in literary journals and have received awards.