Arts & Education Council

GUEST WRITERS

RICHARD BAUSCH has received the O. Henry Prize, the Best American Short Story Prize, and the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and is currently Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the author of Hello to the Cannibals, Real Presence; Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea; Violence; and Take Me Back. Bausch’s short stories have appeared in Esquire and The New Yorker. His latest works include The Stories of Richard Bausch and Crazies (due out in May).
CLYDE EDGERTON is author of the novels Raney, Walking Across Egypt, The Floatplane Notebooks, Killer Diller, In Memory of Junior, Redeye: A Western, and Where Trouble Sleeps. His latest fiction is Lunch at the Piccadilly, and he has recently published a memoir, Solo: My Adventures in the Air. Awards include Fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Foundations, and Five Notable Books of the Year from The New York Times. In 1997, he received the North Carolina Award for Literature. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington.
SUZETTE FRANCIS graduated from Howard University, and after a successful career in business decided to focus exclusively on being a writer. Her first novel, Rules for a Pretty Woman, was named Multicultural Book of the Year by Romantic Times in 2003. Francis lives with her husband and children in Signal Mountain, Tennessee, and has just completed two novels, Moontime and Last Words.
PHILIP GERARD is author of the novels Hatteras Light (nominated for the Ernest Hemingway Prize), Cape Fear Rising, and Desert Kill. He has recently completed a fourth novel, Into the Devil’s Eye, and is at work on another. His books of nonfiction include Brilliant Passage…a Schooning Memoir, Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life, and Writing a Book that Makes a Difference. He has published fiction and nonfiction in numerous magazines, and written award-winning television programs. Gerard teaches in the MFA Program of the Creative Writing Department at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.
MARILYN KALLET is the author of 11 books, including the most recent Circe, After Hours, and The Art of College Teaching: 28 Takes, co-edited with April Morgan. Her poems have been published in hundreds of journals including Prairie Schooner, New Letters, and Tar River Poetry. She was named Outstanding Woman in the Arts by the Knoxville YWCA, and in 2005 was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame. Kallet received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Rutgers University. She directed the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee for 17 years, and now holds the Hodges Chair for Distinguished Teaching in English.
ELIZABETH KOSTOVA’s engrossing debut novel, The Historian, is the culmination of ten years of research and a lifetime of imagining. Since Kostova’s childlhood, when her father entertained her with tales of Dracula, she has envisioned this sensational novel that debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. It has since become the fastest selling debut hardback novel to boot - selling out even faster than The Da Vinci Code. Kostova graduated from Yale and holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, where she won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress.
DAVID MAGEE is the author of five books, including The John Deere Way and Endurance: Winning Life’s Majors the Phil Mickelson Way, both from Wiley, and the recently-released Getting Published: How to Learn and Master the Business of Writing, from Jefferson Press. An award-winning newspaper columnist who now writes for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, he was formerly a newspaper editor, business owner and city councilman in Oxford, Mississippi. Today, he is a full-time writer and the founder and president of Jefferson Press, living with his wife and three children on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.
ROBERT MORGAN is the author of the novel Gap Creek, winner of the Southern Book Award for Fiction, presented by the Southern Book Critics’ Circle. His earlier novel The Truest Pleasure was a finalist for the same award and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Notable. Morgan's works also include The Hinterlands, This Rock, Brave Enemies: A Novel of the American Revolution, and nine volumes of poetry. A native of the North Carolina mountains, Morgan was raised on land settled by his Welsh ancestors. He teaches at Cornell University.