Ellis County Historical Society

Please join the Ellis County Historical Society at 7 p.m. Monday at 100 W. Seventh St., Hays for its annual meeting and a presentation by Robert Day, author of “The Last Cattle Drive.”

Day’s presentation of “The Life and Times of a Kansas Author” will begin at 7:30 p.m. and is open to the public.

Copies of the 30th anniversary printing of “The Last Cattle Drive,” will be available for purchase at the meeting.

Robert Day’s novel “The Last Cattle Drive” was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. His short fiction has won a number of awards and citations, including two Seaton Prizes, a Pen Faulkner/NEA prize, and Best American Short Story and Pushcart citations.

His fiction has been published by Tri-Quarterly, Black Warrior Review, Kansas Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, Summerset Review, and The Four Wheel Drive Quartet, as well as three collections of short fiction: “Speaking French in Kansas,” “Where I Am Now,” and “The Billion Dollar Dream.”

His nonfiction has been published in the Washington Post Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Forbes FYI, Modern Maturity, World Literature Today, American Scholar, and Numero Cinq. As a member of the Prairie Writers Circle, his essays have been reprinted in numerous newspapers and journals nationwide, and on such Internet sites as Counterpunch, and Arts and Letters Daily.

Recent book publications include “We Should Have Come By Water” (poems), “The Committee to Save the World” (literary non-fiction), and “Chance Encounters of a Literary Kind” (memoir), “Let Us Imagine Lost Love” (a novel), and “Robert Day for President: an Embellished Campaign Autobiography.”

Among his awards and fellowships are a National Endowment to the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, Yaddo and McDowell Fellowships, a Maryland Arts Council Award, and the Edgar Wolfe Award for distinguished fiction. His teaching positions include The Iowa Writers Workshop; The University of Kansas; and the Graduate Faculty at Montaigne College, The University of Bordeaux.

He is past acting president of the Associated Writing Programs; the founder and former Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House; and founder and publisher of the Literary House Press at Washington College, Chestertown, Maryland.

Born in Shawnee in eastern Kansas, a suburb of Kansas City, in 1941, Day grew up there before it was all one big suburb. He finished his B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, then went on to teach at Fort Hays University.

He took a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Arkansas and began working in the English Department at Washington College, where he was currently writer in residence. He returns to Kansas for the summers, living in Ludell, a small town in Rawlins County. Kansas remains the setting of much of his fiction.

Biography source: http://www.washburn.edu/reference/cks/mapping/day/index.html