Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.
Walker Percy, OblSB was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Mary Flannery O'Connor was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries.
The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earlier American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics.
Dorothy Allison is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Southern United States literature consists of American literature written about the Southern United States or by writers from the region. Literature written about the American South first began during the colonial era, and developed significantly during and after the period of slavery in the United States. Traditional historiography of Southern United States literature emphasized a unifying history of the region; the significance of family in the South's culture, a sense of community and the role of the individual, justice, the dominance of Christianity and the positive and negative impacts of religion, racial tensions, social class and the usage of local dialects. However, in recent decades, the scholarship of the New Southern Studies has decentralized these conventional tropes in favor of a more geographically, politically, and ideologically expansive "South" or "Souths".
Valerie Martin is an American novelist and short story writer.
Mary Gaitskill is an American novelist, essayist, and short story writer. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Esquire, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. Her books include the short story collection Bad Behavior (1988) and Veronica (2005), which was nominated for both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.
Anya Kamenetz is an American writer living in Brooklyn, New York City. She has been an education correspondent for NPR, a former staff writer for Fast Company magazine, and columnist for Tribune Media Services, and the author of several books. She is currently a senior advisor at the Aspen Institute.
Rodger Kamenetz is an American poet and author best known for The Jew in the Lotus (1994), an account of the historic dialogue between rabbis and the XIV Dalai Lama. His poetry explores the Jewish experience and in recent years, dream consciousness. Since 2003 he's been instrumental in developing Natural Dreamwork, a practice that focuses on the sacred encounters in dreams.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Timothy Martin Gautreaux is an American novelist and short story writer.
Elizabeth Spencer was an American writer. Spencer's first novel, Fire in the Morning, was published in 1948. She wrote a total of nine novels, seven collections of short stories, a memoir, and a play. Her novella The Light in the Piazza (1960) was adapted for the screen in 1962 and transformed into a Broadway musical of the same name in 2005. She was a five-time recipient of the O. Henry Award for short fiction.
Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her short stories, which have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review.
Wendy Brenner is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction and an Associate Professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington (1997-2023), where she won the university's Graduate Mentor Award for her work with MFA students. Brenner is the author of two books, the first of which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her short stories and essays have appeared in such magazines as Allure, Seventeen, Travel & Leisure, The Oxford American, The Sun (magazine), Ploughshares, and Mississippi Review, and have been anthologized in The Best American Essays, Best American Magazine Writing, and New Stories From the South, as well as other anthologies. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for her fiction, and is a Contributing Editor for The Oxford American. In 2016, she was named one of the "Queens of Nonfiction: 56 Women Journalists Everyone Should Read" on New York magazine's "The Cut" blog.
The William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition is one of America's leading literary competitions and has been presenting awards in fiction, nonfiction and poetry since 1993. The competition is named after the Faulkner Society’s namesake, novelist William Faulkner, and William Wisdom of New Orleans, a literary scholar known for his collection of William Faulkner memorabilia. The event is sponsored by the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society of New Orleans. The contest draws celebrity literary judges, and regular participants have included John Biguenet, Stuart Dybek and Bret Lott.
Paula Sharp is an American author whose fictional works focus on the American family and explore themes of social injustice. Her books include The Woman Who Was Not All There, The Imposter, Lost in Jersey City, Crows over a Wheatfield and I Loved You All. She is also a translator of Latin American fiction, including Antonio Skármeta's La insurrección.
Kelly Cherry was an American novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Janna McMahan is an American author who wrote her first novel when she was in her early thirties. She has published four novels, a novella, and several short stories.
Katy Simpson Smith is an American novelist based in New Orleans. As of 2023 is a member of the core faculty at the Bennington College Writing Seminars.
