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

As associate dean for the arts, Ockert will coordinate curricular, personnel, outreach and accreditation activities for the arts disciplines. He will be principal contact with the Edwards College Board of Visitors and will oversee Tapestry, the college’s annual alumni and community magazine.

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’s of Arts in Writing degree, which is accepting its first group of students for the fall 2010 semester.