2023 Clemson Literary Festival Biographical Information
Poetry
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Samuel Amadon
Samuel Amadon is the author of Often, Common, Some, And Free (Omnidawn 2021), Listener (Solid Objects 2020), The Hartford Book (Cleveland State 2012), winner of the Believer Poetry Book Award, and Like a Sea (Iowa 2010), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Lana Turner, and elsewhere. He is the author of four chapbooks, including Each H from Ugly Duckling Presse. He regularly reviews poetry in places such as The Believer, Boston Review, Lana Turner: a journal of poetry and opinion, and Rain Taxi. He edits the poetry journal Oversound with Liz Countryman, and directs the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina.
Desiree C. Bailey
Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O'clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, and the Academy of American Poets, among other journals. Desiree is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, New York. She will be the Writer-in-Residence at Clemson University starting in Fall 2022.
Liz Countryman
Liz Countryman is the author of Green Island, selected by Julie Carr for the 2022 Berkshire Prize from Tupelo Press, and A Forest Almost, selected by Graham Foust for the 2016 Subito Press Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, and The Canary. She is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and MacDowell. A Forest Almost was a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Di Castagnola Award. Countryman received her M.F.A. from the University of Maryland and her Ph.D. from the University of Houston, where she served as poetry editor for Gulf Coast. She lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where she is Assistant Professor at the University of South Carolina and coeditor, with her husband Samuel Amadon, of the poetry journal Oversound.
Santee Frazier
Santee Frazier is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. He received a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Syracuse University. Frazier is the author of Aurum (University of Arizona Press, 2019) and Dark Thirty (University of Arizona Press, 2009). He has received fellowships from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the School for Advanced Research, and the Truman Capote Literary Trust. Frasier is the director of the Institute of American Indian Arts Low Residency MFA program.
Fiction
Manuel Gonzales
Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction, and the novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack! A graduate of the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, he teaches writing and literature at Bennington College. He is also a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. Gonzales lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.
Dustin M. Hoffman
Dustin M. Hoffman writes stories about working people. He’s the author of the story collection No Good for Digging and the fiction chapbook Secrets of the Wild (Word West Press). His first book One-Hundred-Knuckled Fist (University of Nebraska Press) won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He spent ten years painting houses in Michigan before getting his MFA in fiction from Bowling Green State University and his PhD in creative writing from Western Michigan University. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, Masters Review, Witness, Wigleaf, The Adroit Journal, Faultline, One Story, and a bunch of other neat places. He lives in South Carolina and teaches creative writing at Winthrop University.
Sheri Reynolds
Sheri Reynolds is the author of the novels Bitterroot Landing, The Rapture of Canaan (an Oprah book club selection and New York Times bestseller), A Gracious Plenty, Firefly Cloak, The Sweet In-Between, The Homespun Wisdom of Myrtle T. Cribb, The Tender Grave and the play, Orabelle's Wheelbarrow. Sheri grew up in a large, extended family in rural South Carolina. She graduated from Conway High School in 1985, Davidson College in 1989, and Virginia Commonwealth University in 1992. She teaches creative writing and literature at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, where she serves as John C. Cobb Endowed Chair of Humanities. She has also taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, The College of William and Mary, Davidson College, and Old Dominion University. Sheri divides her time between Spartanburg, SC, and Cape Charles, VA, on Virginia's eastern shore.
Jessica Lee Richardson
Jessica Lee Richardson is the author of the short story collection, It Had Been Planned and There Were Guides, which won the FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the PEN American Center/Robert W. Bingham Award. Stories have been honored at Zoetrope and Short Fiction, have appeared in Adroit, Barrelhouse, the Commuter at Electric Lit, Gulf Coast, Slice Magazine and other places. Her novel about emotional contagion and weather won the 2022 Grindstone International Novel Prize. She is an Associate Professor of Fiction at Coastal Carolina University and can be found online at www.jessicaleerichardson.com.
M.O. Walsh
M.O. Walsh’s first book, The Prospect of Magic was published in 2010 by Livingston Press as winner of the Tartt's First Fiction Prize. Described by The Southern Literary Review as a book "so vivid...it brings Louisiana to life in a way that no [book] has done before..." The Prospect of Magic was a named an Editor's Pick for Best Books of 2010 by Oxford American and was a Finalist for the Eric Hoffer Award for General Fiction. His novel My Sunshine Away was a New York Times Bestseller, an Amazon Featured Debut, and an NPR Top 100 book of 2015. It also won the Pat Conroy Book Prize for Fiction. Foreign editions have been published in the UK, Netherlands, Italy, Spain, France, Brazil, Israel, Serbia, Turkey, South Korea and Hungary. Of the book, the novelist Tom Franklin says, "My Sunshine Away is that rarest find, a page-turner you want to read slowly and a literary novel you can't look away from. At times funny, at times spine-tinglingly suspenseful and at times just flat-out wise, this novel is also a meditation on memory, how it can destroy or damn us but redeem us as well. It's a book to read and reread, one that will only get better with time..." The Kirkus Review says "Celebrate fiction lovers: The Gods of Southern Gothic storytelling have inducted a junior member." His latest novel, The Big Door Prize, was published in September 2020. It has received starred reviews from Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly and is hailed by Daniel Wallace (author of Big Fish) as “one of the most big-hearted books you will ever read. Bookreporter.com says The Big Door Prize“establishes once again that Walsh is a writer who needs to live on your bookshelves.” The novel has been optioned for television by Skydance Media and Apple TV. Walsh is currently the director of The Creative Writing Workshop at UNO, with both Resident and Online MFA options, He also directs The Yokshop Writers Conference in Oxford, MS.
