Good and Balanced

Ethan Laughman has worked in both the editorial and marketing departments of the University of Georgia Press. 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.

Lisa Graley is an assistant professor of English and humanities at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the author of the book of poetry Box of Blue Horses. 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.

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.

Tom Kealey is 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 has taught creative writing at Stanford University since 2003.

Andy Plattner has published stories in Paris Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review, and Epoch. His second story collection, A Marriage of Convenience, was published in 2011. Plattner's novel Offerings from a Rust Belt Jockey won the inaugural Mid-Career Novel Award from Dzanc Press. He lives in Atlanta.

Tony Ardizzone 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, among other honors. Born and raised in Chicago, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

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.

Peter LaSalle is the author of two previous short story collections and a novel. His fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Paris Review, Tin House, Southern Review, Best American Short Stories, Best of the West, Sports Best Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He has taught at universities in this country and in France and, in 2005, received the Award for Distinguished Prose from the Antioch Review.

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.

Philip F. Deaver 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.

Eric Shade, who was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, currently lives in Houston, Texas. Shade's stories have appeared in such journals as Indiana Review, Greensboro Review, and River Styx. He is a recipient of a James Michener Fellowship, a writing award given in honor of Donald Barthelme.

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 stories have appeared in Playgirl, Contact, and Denver Quarterly.

Frank Soos, a native of Virginia, is the author of Unified Field Theory, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. He is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.

Gail Galloway Adams is 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 on a small family ranch in central Texas.