DOROTHY ALLISON'S first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, was a finalist for the National Book Award and was made into a film produced by Anjelica Huston. Her novel Cavedweller was a national bestseller. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best.
STEVE ALMOND is the author of two story collections, My Life in Heavy Metal and The Evil B. B. Chow, and a nonfiction book, Candyfreak. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. To find out what kind of music he listens to, check out www.bbchow.com.
JACOB M. APPEL'S short fiction, which has appeared in Agni, The Southwest Review, StoryQuarterly, and elsewhere, has been short-listed for the O. Henry Award and the Pushcart Prize. He is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at New York University and teaches at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the Gotham Writers' Workshop in New York City. Jacob can be reached via e-mail at jma38@columbia.edu; his Internet presence is located at www.jacobmappel.com.
NICK ARVIN is the author of a collection of stories, In the Electric Eden, and a novel, Articles of War. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, and his work has been recognized with the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America fellowship, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the W. Y. Boyd Award from the American Library Association. He teaches occasional classes for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver.
TOM BARBASH is the author of the novel The Last Good Chance, which won the California Book Award and was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year, and the New York Times nonfiction bestseller On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick and 9/11. He is an assistant professor in the graduate MFA program at California College of the Arts.
MARLIN BARTON is from the Black Belt region of Alabama. He has published two collections of short stories, The Dry Well and Dancing by the River, and a novel, A Broken Thing. His stories have appeared in such journals and anthologies as The Sewanee Review and the annual O. Henry Prize Stories collection. He teaches creative writing to juvenile offenders in a program called Writing Our Stories.
RICHARD BAUSCH is the author of nine novels and five collections of short stories, including Take Me Back, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award; The Last Good Time; Mr. Field's Daughter; Violence; The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch; In the Night Season; and Hello to the Cannibals. His short stories have appeared in numerous prize-winning anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize. He has received several awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Writer's Award, and the Award in Literature from the Academy of Arts and Letters. Previously a professor of English and the Heritage Chair of Creative Writing at George Mason University, Bausch now holds the Lillian and Morrie A. Moss Chair of Excellence at the University of Memphis.
TOM BLIGH'S fiction has appeared in The Southern Review, Black Warrior Review, and The Cincinnati Review and his nonfiction in The Believer, Oxford American, and Five Points. He is a doctoral candidate in the creative-writing program at Florida State University.
ROBERT BOSWELL is the author of Century's Son, American Owned Love, Living to Be 100, Mystery Ride, The Geography of Desire, Dancing in the Movies, and Crooked Hearts. He has received two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim fellowship, and numerous prizes for his fiction. His stories have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Pushcart Prize volumes, and in many literary magazines. He teaches at New Mexico State University, the University of Houston, and in the Warren Wilson MFA Program. He lives with his wife, Antonya Nelson, and their two children in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado.
JAMES BROWN teaches at the California State University at San Bernardino. He is also the author of The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir.
JASON BROWN grew up in Maine. His first book was Driving the Heart and Other Stories; his second, a collection of linked stories, is Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work. His stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Harper's, The Atlantic, and elsewhere and have been read on NPR's Selected Shorts.
SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM'S short fiction has appeared in Tin House, TriQuarterly, The Georgia Review, and The Best American Short Stories. Her first novel, Madeleine Is Sleeping, was a finalist for the National Book Award. A recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA fellowship, she lives with her family in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California at San Diego.
NORMA E. CANTú, born and raised along the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, writes and teaches about that region. Her award-winning novel Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera is part of a border trilogy that includes the unpublished works “Papeles de Mujer” and “Cabañuelas: A Love Story.” Among her current projects are a coedited anthology on dance, Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos, and a novel, Champú, or Hair Matters. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and collections. She currently serves as professor of English and U.S. Latina/o literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
CHRISTOPHER CASTELLANI has an MA in creative writing from Boston University and is ABD in English literature at Tufts. His most recent novel, The Saint of Lost Things, was published in 2005. He is also the author of the novel A Kiss from Maddalena, which won the Massachusetts Book Award. Christopher works as artistic director of Grub Street, Inc., a Boston-based nonprofit writing center, and teaches at Swarthmore College. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.christopher castellani.com.
DAN CHAON is the author of several books, including the short-story collection Among the Missing, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. He teaches at Oberlin College.
ALAN CHEUSE is a novelist, story writer, and journalist, the author, among other books, of The Fires, The Grandmothers' Club, The Light Possessed, and Lost and Old Rivers and the memoir Fall Out of Heaven. He serves as book commentator for NPR's evening newsmagazine All Things Considered and teaches in the writing program at George Mason University. His short fiction has recently appeared in Ploughshares, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, New Letters, and The Southern Review. He is the coeditor of Writers Workshop in a Book: The Squaw Valley Community of Writers on the Art of Fiction and the editor of Seeing Ourselves: Great American Short Fiction.
RACHEL CLINE'S first novel, What to Keep, was published in 2004. Her second novel, My Liar, will appear in 2008. Cline spent nine years in Los Angeles, where she wrote unproduced screenplays, teleplays for Knots Landing, and profanity-free dialogue for the movie Glengarry Glen Ross. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and the University of Southern California.
C. MICHAEL CURTIS is the John C. Cobb Professor of Humanities at Wofford College. He also edits fiction for The Atlantic Monthly, for whom he has worked since 1963. He is the editor of six anthologies of short fiction— American Stories: Fiction from The Atlantic Monthly (volumes 1 and 2), Contemporary New England Stories, Contemporary West Coast Stories, God: Stories, and Faith: Stories—and has published poetry, essays, reporting, and reviews in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, The National Review, and many other periodicals. He has taught creative writing and composition at Harvard, Cornell, MIT, Tufts, Boston University, Simmons College, Bennington College, Northeastern University, and elsewhere. He lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina, with his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Cox, with whom he shares the Cobb Chair.
JOHN DUFRESNE teaches creative writing at Florida International University, in Miami, and is the author of, most recently, Johnny Too Bad.
JOSH EMMONS is the author of The Loss of Leon Meed, which won a James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America award. He lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
MERRILL FEITELL'S first book, Here Beneath Low-Flying Planes, won the Iowa Award for Short Fiction. Her stories have appeared in many publications and have been short-listed in The Best American Short Stories and the The O. Henry Prize Stories. She is now part of the creative writing faculty at the University of Maryland and lives in Baltimore.
JULIA FIERRO, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, has taught creative writing at Hofstra University and the University of Iowa. She founded the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop in 2002 and is at work on a novel.
ERIC GOODMAN is the author of four novels, most recently Child of My Right Hand and In Days of Awe. His short stories and essays appear in a wide range of publications. He's won Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council and has enjoyed residencies at the MacDowell Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Headlands Center for the Arts. He directs the creative writing program at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio.
TOM GRIMES is the author of the novels A Stone of the Heart, Season's End, and City of God. His fiction has twice been among the finalists for the PEN/Nelson Algren Award. His work has also been a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, an Editors' Choice, and a New & Noteworthy Paperback. In 1992 he was awarded a James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America fellowship. He is the author of three plays, Spec (for which he won three Los Angeles Dramalogue Awards), New World, and Rehearsal. He raised $2 million to preserve the childhood home of Katherine Anne Porter, which now serves as a literary center for visiting writers and for teaching creative writing to high school children; his essay about the project appeared in Tin House magazine. He is at work on a cycle of linked stories, two of which have appeared, “The Bridge” in The Southeast Review, and “Superbad, 1979” in Narrativemagazine.com. He directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University.
KATE MYERS HANSON received her MFA from the University of Iowa's Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently on the writing faculty at Northern Michigan University, where she is editor in chief of Passages North. Her fiction has appeared in several reviews, including The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and Shenandoah; she has also published a collection of short stories, Narrow Beams.
AMY HASSINGER graduated from Barnard College and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she received her MFA in fiction writing. She is the author of Nina: Adolescence and The Priest's Madonna. Her novels have been translated into Dutch, Spanish, Indonesian, Russian, and Portuguese. She received a 2006 Finalist Award in prose from the Illinois Arts Council and was named a semifinalist for the 2005 Julia Peterkin Award. Her stories have appeared in many journals, including Hunger Mountain, Arts and Letters, Salt Hill, and Natural Bridge, and have been anthologized in Best Lesbian Love Stories. She is also the author of Finding Katahdin: An Exploration of Maine's Past. She's taught English to middle school students, writing and literature to undergraduates, and is currently on the faculty of the University of Nebraska's MFA in Writing program. She lives in Illinois with her family.
DEWITT HENRY'S The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts won the Peter Taylor Award for the Novel. The founding editor of Ploughshares, he has also edited Breaking into Print and Sorrow's Company, among other anthologies. He teaches at Emerson College.
VANESSA FURSE JACKSON is the author of a critical study, Henry Newbolt: Patriotism Is Not Enough, and of a collection of short stories, What I Cannot Say to You. She's originally from England but writes and teaches at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, on the hot and bird-rich Gulf of Mexico.
MICHAEL JAIME-BECERRA is the author of Every Night Is Ladies' Night: Stories. He teaches at the University of California at Riverside.
REBECCA JOHNS is the author of Icebergs: A Novel, as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles. She teaches in the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
ADAM JOHNSON is the Draper Fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches creative writing. He is the author of Parasites Like Us, a novel, and the short-story collection Emporium. His work has appeared in Harper's, Esquire, and The Paris Review. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and three children.
MICHAEL KNIGHT is the author of a novel, Divining Rod, and two collections of short fiction, Dogfight & Other Stories and Goodnight, Nobody. His stories have appeared in such journals as The New Yorker and The Paris Review and have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories and New Stories from the South. He directs the creative-writing program at the University of Tennessee.
DON LEE is the author of the novel Country of Origin, which won an American Book Award, and the story collection Yellow, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. A new novel, Wrack and Ruin, is due out in 2008. Formerly the editor of the literary journal Ploughshares, he now teaches creative writing at Macalester College.
JONATHAN LIEBSON teaches writing at Eugene Lang College of the New School and has taught at New York University, the Gotham Writers Workshop, and the College of Charleston. His work has appeared in Chelsea, South Dakota Review, The Georgia Review, and Meridian, and he has finished his first novel, A Body at Rest.
PAUL LISICKY is the author of Lawnboy and Famous Builder. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Short Takes, Open House, Boulevard, Flash Fiction, and many other anthologies and magazines. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he's the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America, the Henfield Foundation, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where he was twice a fellow. He lives in New York City and teaches in the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College. He recently completed a new novel, Lumina Harbor.
MARGOT LIVESEY is the author of a collection of stories and five novels, including The Missing World, Criminals, Eva Moves the Furniture, and, most recently, Banishing Verona. She has taught in numerous writing programs, including those at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Boston University, and the University of California at Irvine, and is currently writer in residence at Emerson College in Boston.
STEPHEN D. MARLOWE teaches English at Edison State Community College, writes fiction, blogs intermittently, and practices law when the mood strikes him. He lives in Tipp City, Ohio.
LEE MARTIN is the author of the novel The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; the novel Quakertown; the story collection The Least You Need to Know; and the memoirs From Our House and Turning Bones. He directs the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Ohio State University.
ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of two novels, The Giant's House and Niagara Falls All Over Again, and a collection of stories, Here's Your Hat, What's Your Hurry. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
KATHERINE MIN is the author of the novel Secondhand World. Her stories have appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Pushcart Book of Short Stories. In addition, Min had a story listed in The Best American Short Stories 1998 and another read on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1992 and New Hampshire Arts Council fellowships in 1995 and 2004. She has been a Tennessee Williams scholar at the Sewanee Writers Conference and a fellow at Ledig House, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony. She currently teaches at Plymouth State University, in Plymouth, New Hampshire, and at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, in Iowa City, Iowa.
KYOKO MORI is the author of three novels (Shizuko's Daughter; One Bird; Stone Field, True Arrow) and two nonfiction books (The Dream of Water; Polite Lies). She lives in Washington, D.C., and teaches creative writing at George Mason University.
THISBE NISSEN is the author of two novels, Osprey Island and The Good People of New York, and a story collection, Out of the Girls' Room and into the Night. She is also the coauthor (with Erin Ergenbright) of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook. She spends a lot of time amassing junk and figuring out what to do with it.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of numerous novels, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and The Falls. She is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.
VARLEY O'CONNOR'S newest novel is The Cure, loosely based on her father's polio as a child in the 1930s and '40s. She is also the author of A Company of Three, a novel about the world of theater and acting, and Like China. Her prose has appeared and is forthcoming in The Sun magazine and the AWP Writers' Chronicle. An MFA graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California at Irvine, O'Connor is on the faculty of Kent State University and teaches fiction and creative nonfiction writing in the Northeast Ohio Universities Consortium MFA program.
ANN PACKER is the author of the novel The Dive from Clausen's Pier and the short-story collection Mendocino and Other Stories. She is a past recipient of a James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and other magazines, as well as in Prize Stories 1992: The O. Henry Awards. She lives in northern California with her husband and their two children.
AIMEE PHAN'S first book of fiction, We Should Never Meet, won the 2004 Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Prose. It was also a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards and a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book of 2005. Her fiction has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Chelsea, among other journals. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at California College of the Arts.
DAN POPE is the author of the novel In the Cherry Tree. His short stories have been published in Crazyhorse, Post Road, The Iowa Review, McSweeney's, Shenandoah, The Gettysburg Review, Night Train, Witness, and other magazines. Dan is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, which he attended on a Truman Capote Fellowship. He is a winner of the Glenn Schaeffer Award from the International Institute of Modern Letters.
PAULA PRIAMOS'S work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, West Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. She received her MFA in fiction writing from California State University at Long Beach, and teaches English and creative writing at California State University at San Bernardino.
MELISSA PRITCHARD is the nationally acclaimed author of three short-story collections, Spirit Seizures, The Instinct for Bliss, and Disappearing Ingenue, and three novels, Phoenix, Selene of the Spirits, and Late Bloomer. A recipient of numerous awards, including the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Carl Sandburg Award, and the James Phelan Award, and of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pritchard has published fiction widely, in such literary journals as The Southern Review, Boulevard, Open City, The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, and The Paris Review. She is currently a professor of English and women's studies at Arizona State University.
HOLIDAY Reinhorn is the author of Big Cats: Stories. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including, Zoetrope, Tin House, Ploughshares, and the anthology This Is Not Chick Lit. She lives and teaches in Los Angeles, where she is at work on her first novel.
JEWELL PARKER RHODES is the artistic director and the Piper Endowed Chair of the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at Arizona State University. She is the author of four novels, Voodoo Dreams, Magic City, Douglass' Women, and Voodoo Season, and the memoir Porch Stories: A Grandmother's Guide to Happiness. She has published two writing guides: Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors and The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction. Her literary awards include a Yaddo Creative Writing fellowship, the American Book Award, the National Endowment of the Arts Award in Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Award for Literary Excellence, and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award for Outstanding Writing.
TOM ROBBINS has eight novels and one collection currently in print, and while his books are decidedly offbeat, they have consistently been international bestsellers.
THANE ROSENBAUM is the author of the novels The Golems of Gotham (2002) (San Francisco Chronicle Top 100 Book), Second Hand Smoke, which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in 1999, and the novel-in-stories Elijah Visible, which received the Edward Lewis Wallant Award in 1996 for the best book of Jewish-American fiction. He is the editor of the anthology Law Lit, from Atticus Finch to the Practice: A Collection of Great Writing About the Law (2007).
ROBERT ROSENBERG is the author of the novel This Is Not Civilization. He served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Kyrgyzstan and has taught on the White Mountain Apache Reservation in Arizona and in Istanbul, Turkey. He now teaches creative writing at Bucknell University.
COLETTE SARTOR is a graduate of Yale University, Harvard Law School, and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she held the Truman Capote fellowship. She has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and currently teaches writing at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has edited numerous fiction and nonfiction projects, including a creative-writing textbook. She also served as senior fiction editor for the award-winning online journal Pif Magazine. Her stories have appeared in various journals, such as the Harvard Review. She lives with her husband and son in Los Angeles, where she is working on a novel and a short-story collection.
JOSé SKINNER worked as an English-Spanish translator and interpreter before earning his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His collection Flight and Other Stories was a finalist for the Western States Book Award for Fiction and a Barnes & Noble Discover selection. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Texas–Pan American.
R. T. SMITH'S stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, the Pushcart Prize anthology, New Stories from the South, and his collection Uke Rivers Delivers. He lives in Rockbridge County, Virginia, and edits Shenandoah for Washington and Lee University.
JOHN SMOLENS has published five novels and a collection of short stories, including Cold, The Invisible World, and Fire Point. His new novel is entitled '01. In 2006 he was the recipient of a Distinguished Faculty Award from Northern Michigan University, where he is a professor of English.
DEBRA SPARK is the author of the novels Coconuts for the Saint and The Ghost of Bridgetown and the editor of the anthology Twenty Under Thirty: Best Stories by America's New Young Writers. Her most recent book is Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Spark has also written for Esquire, Ploughshares, The New York Times (the travel section and the book review), Food and Wine, Yankee, The Washington Post, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. She has been the recipient of several awards, including an NEA fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, and the John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. She teaches at Colby College and in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.
RENé STEINKE is the author of the novel Holy Skirts, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and was included among the Best Books of 2005 by the Chicago Tribune and The Washington Post. She is also the author of The Fires. Her writing has appeared in anthologies and in The New York Times, Vogue, Bookforum, and TriQuarterly. She is editor at large for The Literary Review and teaches in the graduate and undergraduate writing programs at Fairleigh Dickinson University. She lives in Brooklyn.
SUSAN STRAIGHT is the author of the novel Highwire Moon, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her other novels include Aquaboogie, The Getting Place, Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, and, most recently, A Million Nightingales. She has received a Lannan Foundation Award and a Guggenheim fellowship, and is the chair of the graduate writing program at the University of California at Riverside.
ELIZABETH STROUT'S first novel, Amy and Isabelle, won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, as well as the Orange Prize in England. Her short stories have been published in a number of magazines, including The New Yorker. Her second novel, Abide With Me, received much critical acclaim. Currently she is on the faculty of the low-residency MFA program at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. She lives in New York City.
ROBERT TORRES is an illustrator and interactive-design director living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Originally from Texas, Robert has spent the last ten years of his career in the newspaper industry, building award-winning Web sites and multimedia presentations. Now in his mid-thirties, he can still be found on his skateboard most weekends. A current portfolio of work can be found at his Web site, www.rctorres.com.
VU TRAN was born in Saigon in 1975 and grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Glenn Schaeffer fellow at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where he currently teaches. His fiction has appeared in such publications as The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007, The Southern Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Fence, and the Harvard Review.
DANIELLE TRUSSONI has written for The New York Times Book Review, Tin House, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. Her first book, Falling Through the Earth: A Memoir, was awarded the 2006 James A. Michener/Copernicus Society of America award and was chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2006.
DANIEL WALLACE is the author of three novels: Big Fish, Ray in Reverse, and The Watermelon King. To learn more about him and his work, go to www.danielwallace.org.
MICHELLE WILDGEN is the author of a novel, You're Not You, and the editor of an anthology, Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast. Her work has appeared in the anthologies Death by Pad Thai, Best New American Voices 2004, and Best Food Writing 2004 and in journals including Tin House, StoryQuarterly, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, and Gulf Coast. She is a senior editor at Tin House magazine and an editor at Tin House Books.
MARK WINEGARDNER is the author of The Godfather Returns, which reached number five on the New York Times bestseller list. He has also written two other novels, Crooked River Burning and The Veracruz Boys, and the story collection That's True of Everybody. He is the director of the graduate writing program at Florida State University.