Donald Barthelme was an American short story writer and novelist known for his playful, postmodernist style of short fiction. Barthelme also worked as a newspaper reporter for the Houston Post, was managing editor of Location magazine, director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1961–1962), co-founder of Fiction, and a professor at various universities. He also was one of the original founders of the University of Houston Creative Writing Program.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
Charles Wright is an American poet. He shared the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. From 2014 to 2015, he served as the 20th Poet Laureate of the United States.
David Grossman is an Israeli author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages.
Stuart Dybek is an American writer of fiction and poetry.
August Kleinzahler is an American poet.
Sigrid Nunez is an American writer, best known for her novels. Her seventh novel, The Friend, won the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction. She is on the faculty of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Hunter College (CUNY).
Sarah Willis is an American novelist and short story writer. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Her father, Kirk Willis, was an actor and director at the Cleveland Play House. Theater and the arts have informed much of Willis’ work, especially her second novel, The Rehearsal, which is about a theater troupe preparing a performance of Of Mice and Men. Her work is often set in either Cleveland, Ohio or Chautauqua, New York.
Jack Gantos is an American author of children's books. He is best known for the fictional characters Rotten Ralph and Joey Pigza. Rotten Ralph is a cat who stars in twenty picture books written by Gantos and illustrated by Nicole Rubel from 1976 to 2014. Joey Pigza is a boy with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), featured in five novels from 1998 to 2014.
Lydia Davis is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and translator from French and other languages, who often writes short short stories. Davis has produced several new translations of French literary classics, including Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
James Lasdun is an English novelist and poet.
Ron Rozelle is an American author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including 'Description & Setting: Techniques and Exercises for Crafting a Believable World of People, Places & Events', a volume in the Writers Digest 'Write Great Fiction' series; 'The Windows of Heaven', a novel of the 1900 Galveston storm; 'A Place Apart', a novel set in modern day Ohio; and 'Warden: Death and Life in the Texas Prison System', coauthored with Jim Willett, Rozelle's memoir, 'Into That Good Night', the first non-agented property published by New York’s venerated Farrar, Straus, & Giroux in over five years, was a national short list finalist for the P.E.N. Prize and the Carr P. Collins Award and was selected as the second-best work of nonfiction in the nation for the year 1998 by the San Antonio Express-News. He has taught writing workshops at numerous conferences and universities and was twice the memoir teacher at the Newman National Writer’s Conference at Mississippi College. His articles have appeared in a wide variety of publications, and he has been a featured author at the Texas Book Festival in Austin and the Texas Folklife Festival in San Antonio. 'Touching Winter', a novel made up of a quartet of stories, was published in October, 2005, by TCU Press and was a short list finalist for The Texas Institute of Letters Best Fiction of the Year Prize. 'My Boys and Girls are in There: The 1937 New London School Disaster' was the recipient of the Calvert Prize, was pronounced the “sleeper hit” of the 2012 Texas Book Festival, and was a short list finalist for the Best Nonfiction Award given by the Writers’ League of Texas. 'Sundays with Ron Rozelle', a collection of his newspaper columns, was published by TCU Press in 2009. His most recent book, 'Exiled: The Last Days of Sam Houston', was published by Texas A&M University Press. A graduate of Sam Houston State University, Class of 1977, he holds degrees in English and Political Science and was named the 2017 SHSU Distinguished Educator of the Year, the highest honor given to alumni of the College of Education. In 2007 he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters.
Ehud Havazelet was an American novelist and short story writer.
Christian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in the small west Texas town of Snyder. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003, he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry, a role he stepped down from in June 2013. Wiman is now on the faculty of Yale University, where he teaches courses on Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School and the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.
Henry L. Van Dyke, Jr., was an American novelist, editor, teacher and musician.
BBC National Short Story Award is a British literary award for short stories. It was founded in 2005 by the NESTA with support from BBC Radio 4 and Prospect magazine. The winner receives £15,000 for a single short-story. The award was originally known as 'National Short Story Award' and renamed to 'BBC' starting in 2008 to reflect the current sponsor.
Train Dreams is a novella by Denis Johnson. It was published on August 30, 2011, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was originally published, in slightly different form, in the Summer 2002 issue of The Paris Review.
Laura van den Berg is an American fiction writer. She is the author of five works of fiction. Her first two collections of short stories were each shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, in 2010 and 2014. In 2021, she was awarded the Strauss Livings Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Amelia Gray is an American writer. She is the author of the short story collections AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, and Gutshot, and the novels THREATS, and Isadora. Gray has been shortlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and her television writing has been nominated for a WGA Award.
Marie-Helene Bertino is an American novelist and short story writer. She is the author of two novels, Parakeet (2020) and 2AM at the Cat's Pajamas (2014), and one short story collection, Safe as Houses (2012). She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and an O'Henry Prize for her short stories.
