He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and was for many years a poet and fiction writer, and for a time lived in New York City and wrote for TV Guide, The Village Voice and other publications.
The Sylvie Cycle, his trilogy of middle grade novels, has been widely praised and appears in several foreign editions, as well as in large print and audio versions.
Mr. Townley taught in Chile on a Fulbright scholarship, worked in New York City as an editor, and now writes from his home in Kansas.
Along the way, he has won a number of honors, including the Peregrine Prize for Short Fiction, the Thorpe Menn Award, the Kansas Arts Commission Fellowship in Fiction, the Kansas Governor’s Arts Award, and First Prize in two contests sponsored by the Academy of American Poets.
His novel, The Great Good Thing (the first volume in The Sylvie Cycle), was a Top Ten Book Sense Pick and has been optioned for film.