Marlis Manley Broadhead

A former college instructor of all forms of written communication except Braille, Marlis Manley [Broadhead] has award-winning short stories and poems in literary magazines—including Kansas Quarterly, Mikrokosmos, Crosscurrents, and Kansas Women Writers. Her debut novel, TROPHY GIRL, published by Black Rose Writing last year, was awarded the William Faulkner second prize in 2018.

While still in Wichita, her hometown, where she earned her MFA, she started the Learning Center at the Vo-Tech School for refugees from the Viet Nam war—located on the campus of her alma mater, Wichita High School East—designing a Vocational English as a Second Language program.

In 1981, she and her family moved to Iowa State University where she taught business Communications, helped pilot the rewrite of the USAF Supply Manuel, and was an editor for Better Homes and Garden’s building department.

Thanks to the development of fax machines, she took that writing job to northern California. There she taught a variety of writing classes at College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg, California, while gazing over her students’ heads at the Pacific Ocean.

She also founded the annual Mendocino Coast Writers Conference (still going), started a homeless shelter (a disaster eventually), formed the Mendocino Coast Children’s Fund (still thriving), and steered Fort Bragg Center for the Arts—a public showcase for local artists, who outnumbered regular folks out there five to one.

Back home in Kansas, she lives with her husband and a small menagerie on a modest horse ranch just south of Kansas City where she is working on her third novel and serializing stories on Amazon Kindle Vella in the brave new world of social media.