This fall, we received yet another reason to be proud of our University of Virginia: a great national honor was bestowed upon one of our own professors: Kevin Moffett.
Throughout his career up to now, the professor in the English department’s creative writing program and director of the literary prose concentration, has seen his work be awarded the National Magazine Award, the Nelson Algren Award, a Literature Fellowship in Creative Writing from the National Endowment of the Arts, and more. In September, Only Son, his forthcoming debut novel, was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Award, along with nine other works in the fiction category.
“It was an absolute surprise. It wasn’t even in my mind; I’m not someone who wakes up in the morning and says, ‘Let’s look at the award finalists today.’ So, I just got this bit of happiness from it,” Moffett told UVA Today.
Only Son is the first novel Moffett has released, as he is known for his short stories and experimental work. He has authored two collections of short stories, Permanent Visitors and Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events, and he’s written many individual short stories published in various magazines and anthologies. In 2014, he collaborated with Eli Horowitz and Matthew Derby to create The Silent History, an unorthodox fusion between a digital book and a location-based mobile app. Only Son itself actually began six years ago as a collection of short stories, but as he worked, Moffett said that a connective, overarching structure began to appear.
Only Son follows a man’s life over many years as he struggles with his roles as a son and a father. The first part of the novel focuses on the protagonist’s childhood in Florida, in the wake of his father’s death. The second part jumps 25 years forward, to Southern California, where he struggles to raise a son of his own. The third part follows him and his son, now college-bound, on a road trip, retracing steps found in his own father’s travel journal.
The novel is fictional, but not wholly removed from Moffett’s personal life. “I grew up in Florida like the narrator. There are a lot of autobiographical connections between my childhood and the narrator in the book,” he told UVA today. “I don’t feel shy about saying that or pointing those connections out.”
Questions about fatherhood and coming of age power the novel. “My writing was very much fueled by these questions of reckoning, by the idea of looking back at your childhood in light of raising a child, and coming to an impasse,” Moffett said. Writing the book was a personal experience for him. “Don’t write what you know; write what you can. And write the book you want to read,” he tells his students. Only Son is a product of his own advice.
Only Son is set to be released to the public today, November 4th.
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