• Delighted to announce that Patrick’s third novel, Across the Lake, has just been published and the launch happened at the South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. It has already been adopted by several book clubs and nominated for the Jewish Book Awards.

• Patrick’s latest project, City of Hustle, will be published in October 2022. Part of Belt Publishing‘s “City Series” he co-edited this anthology of Sioux Falls with Jon K Lauck. Book launch coming soon. Thanks to KELO television for getting the word out with this short interview.

• Thanks to the good people at Shepherd for asking Patrick to talk about the Best Books on the Holocaust. These five books had the biggest influence on The Commandant of Lubizec.

• Absolutely delighted to announce that In the Shadow of Dora was selected as a finalist for the 2021 ScreenCraft Cinematic Book Competition in Hollywood. This is for novels that hold exceptional promise to be made into movies. What an honor, and thanks to the judges! Dora has also been named a finalist for the High Plains Book Award. Thanks so much to the judges and readers.

• Writer’s Digest recently invited Patrick to contribute an article about how grant writing transformed his writing. He received over $12,000 to write In the Shadow of Dora and was happy to explain how he goes about applying for, and using, grant money to advance his art.

• Patrick enjoyed a wonderful conversation with Lynne Golodner on Make Meaning. They talked about finding purpose in your life, being brave on the page, and having a mission statement for your work.

• Thanks to Lori Walsh at “In the Moment” for a wonderful interview about In the Shadow of Dora and also to the good people at the South Dakota Festival of Books who hosted the very first reading on October 22. It was an honor to close out the festival as one of the plenary speakers.

• A new interview with Patrick is up at Fiction Writer’s Review. In it, he talks with Hannah Redder about writing and researching In the Shadow of Dora.

• Patrick’s second novel, In the Shadow of Dora, is now available and the first review is in from Wrath-Bearing Tree. Huge thanks to Andria Williams for this thoughtful review that asks hard questions about what it means to survive torture and trauma. New interviews with Patrick are lined up with North American Review, and War, Literature, and the Arts. More info about readings forthcoming. Stay tuned…

• This just in: Patrick will be headlining several events for this year’s (virtual) South Dakota Festival of Books. Breakdown of events include: opening kickoff reading on October 2, lecture on “Rise of the Third Reich” on October 13, and Reading of In the Shadow of Dora on October 22. Tickets are required, but free.

• Thanks to SDPB’s literary special, “Brown Bag Lunch Club” for the hour long interview about Patrick’s latest book, Library of the Mind. Video of this live event will be released soon. Wonderful questions were asked and several poems were debuted for the very first time.

• Patrick is thrilled to have been interviewed by the wonderfully named journal, Farsickness, where he talked about his dual Irish-American citizenship, his deep roots in the UK, and his recent travels from Germany to Jerusalem.

• First official interview for Library of the Mind: New & Selected Poems! Thanks to SDPB radio and especially Lori Walsh. It was fun chatting about how the book came together, the Midwest, and why I wrote a poem about Harry Potter. More on Library of the Mind coming soon, including book tour for 2019.

• Big poetry news: Patrick has just become the host and curator of a weekly radio program called Poetry from Studio 47. It airs weekly on NPR affiliate, South Dakota Public Broadcasting. The first episode aired in January 2019. Stayed tuned…weekly episodes to follow throughout the year.

• Patrick recently received news that he is a finalist (one of three) for the Poet Laureate of South Dakota. A final decision will be made by the South Dakota State Poetry Society, with an official appointment by the Governor later in the year. Patrick is delighted to be in the good company of Christine Stewart and Jim Reese, who are also finalists.

• What a tremendous honor to be interviewed by Andria Williams for The Wrath-Bearing Tree. Patrick talked about his latest novel, about a secret underground Nazi concentration camp that is directly tied to landing on the moon, and much else. “Shining Light on the Darkness: An Interview with Patrick Hicks” is the feature interview for September 2018. It’s an even bigger honor to have the first chapter of Eclipse published in this issue. The link for “Into the Tunnel” can be found here.

• It’s been a busy week. Not only was Patrick honored with a “Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award” at the South Dakota Festival of Books, but he was also featured on PBS’s Great American Read for a segment on Midwest writers.

• Big news: “V-2 and Saturn V” has been published with Guernica after being named a finalist for the Steinberg Essay Prize, hosted by Fourth Genre.

• Absolutely delighted to report that The Commandant of Lubizec has just been released by Audible. You can link to it here. Narrated by Steven Jay Cohen, it’s wonderful to hear the novel take on new form.

• Patrick was recently named the 2018-2020 recipient of the “Frederick C. Kohlmeyer Distinguished Teaching Professorship Award”. This comes with a $10,000 stipend to support research over two years. He is surprised and humbled by this tremendous honor and intends to use some of the funds to visit Yad Vashem in Israel as well as complete work on his next book.

• This just in: Ireland’s famed press, Salmon Poetry, will be publishing a New & Selected of Patrick’s poems. Publication date is March 2019 with a book launch in Portland, Oregon. Tour to follow. Working title is Library of the Mind.

• Huge heartfelt thanks to Alaska Quarterly Review for publishing Patrick’s latest essay, “In the Shadow of the Titanic“. It took a month to write this piece and it’s about the Titanic being built in the city of Patrick’s ancestors, as well as a family tragedy that happened in the 1970s. Of the many things he’s written over the years, this one means a great deal. It’s been haunting him for decades. And now, it’s finally out in the world. Thanks AQR!

• Patrick is delighted to announce that he was a finalist (one of four) for an Emmy (Writer—Short Form) for “Here and Then.” The award ceremony for the Upper Midwest Chapter was in October. It was fun to wear a tuxedo.

• Many many thanks to the South Dakota Arts Council for awarding Patrick a highly competitive Artist Fellowship Grant of $5,000 for him to work on his next novel. It’s an honor to be one of only two chosen for this award.

• The Loft Literary Center has just awarded Patrick the 2016 “Excellence in Teaching Fellowship”. Aside from the tremendous honor of the award itself, he’ll be spending a portion of the summer at the Madeline Island School of the Arts working on his next novel.

• Holocaust scholar, Dr. Stephen Gaies, has just written a wonderful academic article on The Commandant of Lubizec. In it, he explores the narrative voice and how the novel successfully captures so many issues that swirl around Holocaust Studies. It is the first major study of the novel. You can read it here.

• Not only is Patrick’s novel given a wonderful review in the latest issue of War, Literature, and the Arts, but the review itself is an amazing read — it’s part review and part creative nonfiction. A BIG thank you to Sean Purio for his kind words. (Thanks also to the good people at WLA for reprinting the chapter “Numbers” for their Author Spotlight section; it’s a tremendous honor.) To read the entire review, click here.

• Thanks to the good people at Sundress for the roundtable table discussion, “Writing the Tragedy of Others” where Patrick appeared with Ellen Sussman, Andria Williams, and Liz Prato. You can read their discussion  here.

• A glowing review of The Collector of Names recently appeared in Colorado Review (read the entire review here), and Patrick has also written another piece for The Huffington Post due to renewed interest in the tragedy of Pan Am 103. (PBS’s Frontline is currently airing an investigative report of the bombing, and Patrick’s popular story, “57 Gatwick” is loosely based upon this act of aviation terrorism.)

• The South Dakota Council of Teachers of English just named Patrick the “Author of the Year”. His books will be read across the state throughout calendar year 2016.

• One of Patrick’s poems, “The Strangers,” has appeared in Ted Kooser’s syndicated newspaper column, American Life in Poetry, and he also read it on PBS’s NewsHour. You can find the print version here and a link to PBS here. It was also read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac.

• Patrick was recently invited to be a featured blogger for The Huffington Post, and his first of many entries is titled, ”Rush and Me”. Future posts will be about books, writing, and the writing life. The good editors at Glimmer Train also asked him to offer a guest blog, and he was happy to offer up, ”Writing What You Don’t Know”. Thanks to both venues. It’s an honor.

• The Commandant of Lubizec has been added to National Reading Group Month and it will also be featured by Random House in January 2015 as a top novel for First Year Experiences in colleges and universities across the nation. To Patrick’s great delight, it was mentioned on Minnesota Public Radio as a “Best Book of 2014”. Stay tuned for more information as it comes in…