Allen Wier

Allen Wier was born in Texas and grew up in Texas, Mexico, and Louisiana. Wier has published two collections of short stories: Late Night, Early Morning (available in October 2017) and Things About to Disappear and four novels: Tehano, A Place for Outlaws, Departing as Air, and Blanco. He's edited an anthology, Walking on Water and other stories, and co-edited Voicelust, a collection of essays ‘on style in contemporary fiction.’ Recipient of the Robert Penn Warren Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, he was voted into the Fellowship and has served as the Fellowship’s Vice Chancellor and Chancellor. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters, and he has been awarded the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. His fiction, essays, and reviews appear in such publications as The Southern Review, Five Points, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and the New York Times. He was named Travel Writer of the Year (1994) by the Alabama Bureau of Travel. He’s taught at Longwood College, Carnegie-Mellon Univ., Hollins College, the Univ. of Texas, Florida International Univ., and the Univ. of Alabama. He taught in the Univ. of New Orleans’ low-residency MFA program’s Edinburgh Workshop in Scotland, he was Visiting Eminent Scholar at the Univ. of Alabama Huntsville, and he has several times been on the faculty of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Professor emeritus at the Univ. of Tennessee where he held the Hodges’ Chair for Distinguished Teaching and where graduate students in the English Department voted Wier the “most outstanding professor in the classroom,” he is currently the Watkins endowed visiting writer at Murray State University in Kentucky. Allen Wier lives with his artist wife, Donnie, overlooking Lake Guntersville in North Alabama. More information is available at his website: http://allenwierfiction.com/