Jill McCorkle is the author of four story collections—Crash Diet, Final Vinyl Days, Creatures of Habit, and Going Away Shoes—and five novels, all cited by The New York Times as Notable Books—The Cheer Leader, July 7th, Tending to Virginia, Ferris Beach, and Carolina Moon. Her work has been anthologized in New Stories from the South, New Stories by Southern Women, Norton Anthology of Short Fiction, and Best American Short Stories. A recipient of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the North Carolina Award for Literature, she is currently on faculty at North Carolina State University. McCorkle also serves on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Writer Jayne Anne Phillips declared, “Jill McCorkle is the guardian angel of American short fiction.”
Allan Gurganus, a North Carolina native, is the author of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy), White People (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen-Faulkner Finalist), Plays Well with Others, and The Practical Heart: Four Novellas (Lambda Literary Award). His stories have won the National Magazine Prize and have been collected in Best American Stories, The O. Henry Prize Collection, and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Gurganus has taught literature and fiction writing at Duke University, The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Stanford University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Gurganus was a recent John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His current novel-in-progress is the second in the Falls Trilogy. Critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said, “Allan Gurganus writes without a safety net; no precautions are taken against pathos, bathos, authorial indignity. Gurganus locates the dangerous glamour in ordinariness. He can do anything he likes as a writer.”
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Richard Bausch, Past Chancellor of The Fellowship of Southern Writers, currently serves as The Moss Chair of Excellence in the Writing Program at The University of Memphis. He is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, In The Night Season, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers: 3 Short Novels, and, most recently, Something is Out There. An acknowledged master of the short story form, Bausch has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, and, for Peace, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Allen Wier has published four novels, most recently Tehano, and a collection of stories, Things About to Disappear. He has edited an anthology, Walking on Water and other stories, and co-edited Voicelust, a collection of essays ‘on style in contemporary fiction’. In 2001 he was voted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Robert Penn Warren Award, and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters. He holds the Hodges’ Chair for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.