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Ockert appointed interim associate dean for arts

Jason Ockert has been appointed interim associate dean for arts within the Thomas W. and Robin W. Edwards College of the Humanities and Fine Arts for the 2010-2011 year.

Ockert was recently tenured and promoted to associate professor in the Department of English. He earned a bachelor’s degree in English with a concentration in creative writing from the University of Florida and a master’s degree in fiction writing from Syracuse University.

Ockert was previously a professor of creative writing and fiction writing at Ithaca College in New York. He has won several national fiction awards and is the author of the short story collection Rabbit Punches. His stories have appeared in many journals including the Oxford American, Black Warrior Review, Indiana Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mid-American Review, McSweeney's, Ecotone and Witness. Ockert’s work is included in the 2007 anthologies of New Stories from the South and Best American Mystery Stories. In 2008 he was a Dakin Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Ockert was also instrumental in creating the University’s Master of Arts in Writing degree, which is accepting its first group of students for the fall 2010 semester.

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