Kerry Langan's stories capture those fleeting moments when a child experiences a revelation about the adult world, often a disturbing portent. She is equally fascinated with childhood experiences that haunt adults and become more significant with the passing of time. Although her characters and settings are highly realistic and often humorous, Langan reveals how pain distorts one's world, how lives can be tenuously held together by secrets and memories. Her characters are not allowed to suffer delusions; they learn hard, undeniable truths about themselves. Where others would look away, Langan...

SHIFTING BALANCE SHEETS: Women's Stories of Naturalized Citizenship & Cultural Attachment. A Wising Up Anthology. Editors: Heather Tosteson, Kerry Langan, Charles D. Brockett and Debra Gingerich. In this anthology, thirty-four women and girls from twenty countries, now living all across the U.S., reflect on their journeys to naturalized U.S. citizenship-journeys that invite all of us, native and foreign born, to consider what it means to choose to be an American. In Chinese Daughters: All-American Girls, American mothers whose Chinese daughters have become naturalized citizens through...

In her second book of stories, Live Your Life & OTher Stories, Kerry Langan explores, through characters drawn from academe and the wider world, the myths that unconsciously shape our behavior and our sense of possibility-and what happens when, in an unguarded moment, an unforseen circumstance, we catch a defining glimpse of who we actually are. In the first section, Live Your Life , an unemployed philosophy major fresh from college tries to live out his utopia; a teenage telemarketer learns success is more than cold calls and sales volume; a jilted groom stumbles into a full life; a hair...

Creativity & Constraint, A Wising Up Anthology Heather Tosteson, Charles D. Brockett, Kerry Langan, Michele Markarian, Editors We often think of true creativity as unfettered liberty-but is creativity something that only takes root, flourishes, within bounds? What happens to our ideas if they must work their way through the material world-often being materially changed in the process? Why is it that we often feel more empowered, more intimately related within the artifice of a story, a song, a painting than we do in the world at large? What do we learn when we try to take that expansiveness...