Ethan Laughman is a recruitment, marketing, and communications specialist at the University of Georgia's College of Environment and Design. Among the few who have read every Flannery O'Connor Award-winning volume, he has collaborated closely with the series' authors in compiling these new anthologies.
Robert Abel (1941-2017) was the author of Full-tilt Boogie; The Progress of a Fire; Freedom Dues, or, A Gentleman's Progress in the New World; and Skin and Bones. His collection of stories, Ghost Traps, received the 1990 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. His stories have appeared in Playgirl, Contact, and Denver Quarterly.
Gail Galloway Adams is the author of The Purchase of Order, which received the 1987 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is a professor emeritus at West Virginia University, where she taught creative writing for over twenty years. Adams served as fiction editor for Arts and Letters: A Literary Journal and for the Potomac Review. She has been a reader/judge for several short fiction awards series. She has recently taught at Kenyon College, West Virginia Wesleyan College, and the Wild Acres Writers Workshop. She also works privately as a short story and novel editorial consultant and lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Tony Ardizzone is the author of The Evening News, which won the 1985 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is the author of seven books of fiction, most recently The Arab's Ox: Stories of Morocco. His novels include The Whale Chaser, In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu, Heart of the Order, and In the Name of the Father. His work has received the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Milkweed Editions National Fiction Prize, the Chicago Foundation for Literature Award for Fiction, the Virginia Prize for Fiction, the Pushcart Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Born and raised in Chicago, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon.
Francois Camoin is the retired director of the creative writing program at the University of Utah. His work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Playboy, the Mid-American Review, the Missouri Review, and Nimrod, among other publications. Camoin has received the Associated Writing Program's Award for Fiction and the Salt Lake City Mayor's Artist Award. He is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction including, most recently, the story collection April, May, and So On.
Philip F. Deaver is the author of Silent Retreats, which received the 1987 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Bread Loaf. His short fiction has appeared in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1988 and has been recognized in Best American Short Stories 1995 and The Pushcart Prize XX. Deaver taught in the English Department at Rollins College and was permanent writer in residence there. He was also on the fiction faculty in the Spalding University brief residency MFA program.
Lisa Graley is the author of The Current That Carries, which received the 2017 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is an associate professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she holds the Friends of Humanities/LEQSF Regents Professorship in the Humanities. She is the author of the book Box of Blue Horses, which won the 2012 Gival Press Poetry Award. She was awarded an ATLAS (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) sabbatical in 2009-10 by the Louisiana Board of Regents. Her stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, the Georgia Review, and the McNeese Review.
Tom Kealey is the author of Thieves I've Known, which received the 2012 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is also the author of The Creative Writing MFA Handbook. His stories have appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Glimmer Train, Story Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and the San Francisco Chronicle. His nonfiction has appeared in Poets and Writers and The Writer. He received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award. Tom is a former Stegner Fellow andhas taught creative writing at Stanford University since 2003.
Peter Lasalle, 2006 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction winner for Tell Borges If You See Him, is the author of eight previous books, including both novels and short story collections-most recently Sleeping Mask: Fictions and The City at Three P.M.: Writing, Reading, and Traveling. His fiction and essays have been selected for several award anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, Best American Mystery Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Travel Writing, Sports Best Short Stories, Best of the West, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a member of the creative writing faculty at the University of Texas, and Narragansett, in his native Rhode Island.
Peter Meinke has published stories and poems in the Atlantic, Redbook, Yankee, the New Yorker, New Republic, and Virginia Quarterly Review. His stories have twice been included in the O'Henry Award volumes and once in Best American Short Stories. In 1975 he studied in Africa and in 1978-79 he was a Fulbright lecturer in Poland. He is director of the writing workshop at Eckerd College.
Andy Plattner is the author of Winter Money, which received the 1996 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He has published three other books of literary fiction: A Marriage of Convenience, Offerings from a Rust Belt Jockey, and Dixie Luck: Stories and the novella Terminal. His fiction has earned two gold medals from the Faulkner Society, the Dzanc Mid-Career Novel Prize, a Henfield Prize, the Ferrol Sams Fiction Award, the Castleton-Lyons Book Award and a silver medal in literary fiction from the Independent Book Publishers' Awards.
Frank Soos, a native of Virginia, is the author of Unified Field Theory, which won the 1997 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is also the author of Unpleasantries: Considerations of Difficult Questions, Bamboo Fly Rod Suite, Early Yet, and Double Moon: Constructions and Conversations with Margo Klass. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
Darrell Spencer is the Stocker Professor of Creative Writing at Ohio State University. He is the author of a novel, One Mile Past Dangerous Curve, and four story collections, the last of which, Bring Your Legs with You, won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.
