Dr. David Armstrong

Professor of Creative Writing & Film, Dr. David Armstrong is an award-winning screenwriter, essayist, and author of short fiction. He is the screenwriter of Light of the World, winner of the Movieguide Award for Best Movie for Children, and co-creator and screenwriter of Quokka’s Wild Life, winner of three Telly Awards. Armstrong’s books include the award-winning story collections Going Anywhere, Reiterations, The Correspondence Principle, and a novella, Missives from the Green Campaign. His short work appears in Kenyon Review, Narrative, North American Review, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and elsewhere. His individual stories have won the Mississippi Review Prize, the New South Writing Award, the Hargrove Editors’ Prize, and been a top five story of the year in Narrative, among other accolades.

Dr. Armstrong grew up in Appalachia and worked with underprivileged youth as a social worker before earning his PhD as a Black Mountain Institute Fiction Fellow at UNLV. He’s an alum of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Workshop and teaches courses in literary fiction, sci-fi & fantasy writing, film, publishing, screenwriting, and video game story design at UIW. He holds the Slattery Endowed Chair in English and is the UIW Moody Professor for 2026-2027. Armstrong is faculty advisor for both INK English Club and Quirk, UIW’s National Literary Journal. His community outreach project, the Rising Writers Literacy Initiative, sees UIW students collaborate with elementary and high school writers to produce a professional story collection designed and published by UIW interns & authors.