Visiting Writer in Fiction Ben Fountain

Posted: January 12, 2009

A resident of Dallas for the past 25 years, Ben Fountain is a North Carolina native and holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and from Duke University School of Law. His short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara received the 2007 PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2006 Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction. His stories have appeared in such magazines as Harper's, The Paris Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story, and have received an O.Henry Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the McGinnis-Ritchie Prize for fiction, and two short story awards from the Texas Institute of Letters. He received a Whiting Writers' Award in 2007.

From 2004 to 2006 he served as fiction editor of the Southwest Review, where he published such writers as Arthur Miller, Naguib Mahfouz, and James Kelman, in addition to a number of new writers who went on to secure their first book contracts, including Katherine Taylor (Rules for Saying Good-Bye), Don Waters
(Desert Gothic) and Kirsten Menger-Anderson (Doctor Olaf Van Schuler's Brain). He has served on the board of WordSpace Dallas since 2003 and served as board president from 2006 to 2007. At present he is working on a novel and short stories.

Fountain will be visiting the Creative Writing Program through the spring semester.

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Liberal Arts Services

Visiting Writer in Fiction Ben Fountain

Posted: January 12, 2009