Elise Blackwell is the author of four novels: Hunger, The Unnatural History of Cypress Parish, Grub, and An Unfinished Score. Her work has been translated into several languages ,and her books have been named to numerous “best of the year” lists, including the Los Angeles Times and Kirkus. Her short stories and cultural criticism have appeared in Witness, Global City Review, and elsewhere. Originally from southern Louisiana, Blackwell now directs the MFA program at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. http://eliseblackwell.com/ Elizabeth Cox has published four novels and a collection of short stories; a book of poems is scheduled to come out in the fall of 2013. Her novel Night Talk won the Lillian Smith Award given by the Southern Regional Council; her stories have been cited for excellence in both Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Press; she received the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2012. Cox taught at Duke University for seventeen years; currently she shares the John Cobb Chair of Humanities at Wofford College with her husband, C. Michael Curtis. www.elizabethcox.net Phillip Gardner is the author of two short story collections, Somebody Wants Somebody Dead and Someone to Crawl Back To. He lives in Darlington, South Carolina and teaches at Francis Marion University. http://www.phillipjgardner.com/ Marianne Gingher has written plays, short stories, a novel, and two memoirs; she has also edited a grammar book and a flash fiction anthology. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Southern Review, The Oxford American, and North American Review. From 1997 to 2002, Gingher was director of the creative writing program at UNC Chapel Hill where she now holds the title of Bowman and Gordon Gray Distinguished Term Professor. http://englishcomplit.unc.edu/people/gingherm Cecile Goding’s stories, poems , and essays have appeared in a number of publications, including The Iowa Review, Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, and Inheritance: Selections from the SC Fiction Project. She won the Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo Prizes from Poetry Northwest, a fellowship from the South Carolina Academy of Authors, and a Bread Loaf Scholarship. A native of Florence, South Carolina, Goding now teaches at Mount Mercy University and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Randall Kenan is the author of a novel, two works of nonfiction, and a collection of stories. He edited and wrote the introduction for The Cross of Redemption: The Uncollected Writings of James Baldwin. Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the North Carolina Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rome Prize. He holds the rank of Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. www.randallkenan.com Bret Lott is the bestselling author of thirteen books, most recently the novel Dead Low Tide (Random House 2012). Since 1986 he has taught at the College of Charleston except for a brief period from 2004 to 2007 when he held the position of editor of The Southern Review at Louisiana State. His honors include serving as a Fulbright Senior American Scholar and a member of the National Council on the Arts. He and his wife, Melanie, live in Hanahan, South Carolina. http://english.cofc.edu/about/faculty-staff-listing/lott-bret.php Jill McCorkle, a native of Lumberton, North Carolina, is the author of four short story collections and six novels, including Life After Life. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals including The Atlantic, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, and Best American Short Stories. McCorkle has taught at UNC Chapel Hill, Harvard, Brandeis, and the Bennington Writing Program. She currently teaches at NC State University. www.jillmccorkle.com
Michael Parker is the author of five novels and two collections of short stories; a new novel Five Thousand Dollar Car is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in 2014. He is the recipient of three lifetime achievement awards: The North Carolina Award for Literature, the R. Hunt Parker Award for the Arts, and the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters. A professor in the MFA program at UNC Greensboro, Parker divides his time between Greensboro, NC and Austin, Texas. www.michaelparker.com Ron Rash is the author of five novels, five books of short stories, and four poetry collections. Twice a Pen/Faulkner finalist, he is the winner of the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He teaches at Western Carolina University. Rash was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2010. www.rusoffagency.com George Singleton has published five collections of stories, two novels, and one book of nonfiction. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, New Stories from the South (ten times), and elsewhere. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2009 and the Hillsdale Award in Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2011. Singleton teaches fiction writing at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Sciences. He was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors in 2010. Deno Trakas writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction; his work has been published in magazines such as The Oxford American and six anthologies, including the award-winning New Southern Harmonies. He is the recipient of five South Carolina Fiction Project Prizes and a South Carolina Individual Artist Grant. Trakas lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina; he is the Hoy Professor of American Literature at Wofford College. http://sites.wofford.edu/trakasdp/
|        Carolinas photos by Tom Mack |
