Richard Duggin’s Highly Acclaimed Novel On the Tragedies of Bullying Exhibited at the Printers Row Lit Fest

For newly published authors, the Printers Row Lit Fest is an opportunity to showcase their work at the very spot where many other aspiring writers had made their start.

But for more experienced and highly-acclaimed professionals like Richard Duggin, author of the novel “Boys in Exile,” the event still remains an important means to encourage the literary arts with their own work. His book was exhibited with the help of ReadersMagnet, a book marketing and self-publishing company.

Duggin is well-known for his extensive 60-year stint teaching fiction at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He also founded the UNO Writer’s Workshop and served as its chair. And in 2005, he founded and directed the University of Nebraska MFA Writing program.

Many of his published works include a rich variety of short stories as well as three published novels. They’ve been featured in a number of magazines, including Playboy, Crosscurrents, and Kansas Quarterly.

For the Printers Row Lit Fest, he decided to exhibit “Boys in Exile,” one of his more recent novels.

“Boys in Exile” is somewhere between a coming-of-age story and a recollection. It begins with the elderly Elliott Street as he finds himself consoling and tending to his grandson. The young boy had recently been accosted by bullies, and the signs of his injuries ultimately prompt the old man to share a very painful story.

It turns out that Street was one of ten boys selected to stay at a distant mountain cabin for a special program that fostered “life-long social skills.” In reality, however, Street’s own weak physique and vulnerability to the bullies in his group set off a tragic chain of events that would scar him even to his advanced years.

Reviewers have already praised the powerful impact of the novel’s message, and Richard Duggin hopes that many visitors to the Printers Row Lit Fest were also just as moved. For those who would want a copy, “Boys in Exile”’ is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

“Boys in Exile”
Author: Richard Duggin
Published date: June 10, 2022
Publisher: BookLocker Press
Genre: Novel

Author Bio
Richard Duggin, a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, has taught fiction writing at the University of Nebraska at Omaha for the past sixty years. He founded and was chair of the UNO Writer’s Workshop, a BFA degree program in creative writing. More recently, in 2005 he founded and was Director of the University of Nebraska MFA in Writing program, a low-residency graduate writing program in fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, screen and stage.

Duggin’s published work includes 3 novels: The Music Box Treaty; Woman Refusing To Leave; “Boys In Exile;” and a collection of short stories, Why Won’t You Talk To Me: Selected Stories. He has published widely a number of short fiction which have appeared in such periodicals as Beloit Fiction Journal, Laurel Review, The Sun, Playboy Magazine, Crosscurrents, Kansas Quarterly, and elsewhere. His work has been cited by Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Playboy Magazine Best Fiction.

Over the years, he received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two Nebraska Arts Council Individual Artist Merit Awards, and was awarded several artist residencies at Ragdale, Yaddo, and the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies.

He lives with his wife, Cynthia, and two dogs in Omaha, Nebraska.

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