Speakers - John Edgar Wideman Literary Society

John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, DC., in 1941. Shortly before his first birthday, his family moved to Homewood, an African-American community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which has been the locale of much of his fiction. He attended Peabody High, one of Pittsburgh's best secondary schools, where he excelled in his studies as well as in sports.

He was awarded a Benjamin Franklin scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania, where he not only won a creative writing prize but also earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Matching his scholastic achievements with his athletic ones, he won All-Ivy League status as a forward on the basketball team and successfully competed on the track team. In 1963, he graduated with a B.A. in English, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford University's New College.

Returning to the United States in 1966, Wideman spent a year as a Kent Fellow at the University of lowa's Writers' Workshop, where he completed his first novel, A Glance Away, published in 1967. His other novels include Two Cities, Hurry Home, The Lynchers, Hiding Place, Sent for You Yesterday, Philadelphia Fire, and The Cattle Killing. He is the author of a memoir, Brothers and Keepers. His short story collections are Damballah, Fever, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, and All Stories Are True. Houghton Mifflin will reissue the short story collection Damballah and the novel Hiding Place in September 1998 in the Mariner trade paperback series. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman -- 19 interviews spanning 3 decades-has recently been published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Wideman is the only writer to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice-- once in 1984 for his novel Sent for You Yesterday and again in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 1998, Wideman won the Rea Award for the short story, an award judged this year by Grace Paley, Tim O'Brien, and Gina Berriault (previous winners include John Cheever and Eudora Wefty). In 1990, he also received the American Book Award for Fiction. He was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 1991 and the MacArthur Award in 1993. Other honors include the St. Botolph Literary Award (1993), the DuSable Museum Prize for Nonfiction for Brothers and Keepers (1985), the Longwood College Medal for Literary Excellence, and the National Magazine Editors' Prize for Short Fiction (1987). In 1996, he edited the annual anthology The BestAmerican Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin). He is currently at work on a collection of essays about race and basketball.

Information available at: http://aalbc.com/authors/johne.htm.

	PENN Conference Center Philadelphia, Pennsylvania October 10 - 11, 2003
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John Edgar Wideman	John Edgar Wideman was born in Washington, DC., in 1941. Shortly before his first birthday, his family moved to Homewood, an African-American community in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which has been the locale of much of his fiction. He attended Peabody High, one of Pittsburgh's best secondary schools, where he excelled in his studies as well as in sports. He was awarded a Benjamin Franklin scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania, where he not only won a creative writing prize but also earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Matching his scholastic achievements with his athletic ones, he won All-Ivy League status as a forward on the basketball team and successfully competed on the track team. In 1963, he graduated with a B.A. in English, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford University's New College. Returning to the United States in 1966, Wideman spent a year as a Kent Fellow at the University of lowa's Writers' Workshop, where he completed his first novel, A Glance Away, published in 1967. His other novels include Two Cities, Hurry Home, The Lynchers, Hiding Place, Sent for You Yesterday, Philadelphia Fire, and The Cattle Killing. He is the author of a memoir, Brothers and Keepers. His short story collections are Damballah, Fever, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman, and All Stories Are True. Houghton Mifflin will reissue the short story collection Damballah and the novel Hiding Place in September 1998 in the Mariner trade paperback series. Conversations with John Edgar Wideman -- 19 interviews spanning 3 decades-has recently been published by the University Press of Mississippi. Wideman is the only writer to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice-- once in 1984 for his novel Sent for You Yesterday and again in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. In 1998, Wideman won the Rea Award for the short story, an award judged this year by Grace Paley, Tim O'Brien, and Gina Berriault (previous winners include John Cheever and Eudora Wefty). In 1990, he also received the American Book Award for Fiction. He was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 1991 and the MacArthur Award in 1993. Other honors include the St. Botolph Literary Award (1993), the DuSable Museum Prize for Nonfiction for Brothers and Keepers (1985), the Longwood College Medal for Literary Excellence, and the National Magazine Editors' Prize for Short Fiction (1987). In 1996, he edited the annual anthology The BestAmerican Short Stories (Houghton Mifflin). He is currently at work on a collection of essays about race and basketball. Information available at: http://aalbc.com/authors/johne.htm.
Daniel Wideman	Daniel J. Wideman's first volume of poetry, The Music of Scars, will be published by Big Drum Press in June, 2003. He is co-editor of Soulfires: Young Black Men on Love and Violence (Penguin, 1996) and author of a book of nonfiction, Singing Sankofa (Scribners, forthcoming). His play, Going to Meet the Light, was produced at the Rites and Reason Theatre in Providence in 1994. He is currently working on a novel, A Ticket 'Til Morning, and a memoir about growing up in a multiracial family. Mr. Wideman gathered splinters as a backup point guard at Brown University, and has also studied in England at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies; and at Northwestern University. He has served as writer-in-residence at the DuBois Pan-African Cultural Centre in Accra, Ghana, and at the Sonja Haynes Stone Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His work has appeared in the journal Callaloo and in the anthologies Giant Steps: The New Generation of African-American Writers; Step Into A World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature; Outside the Law: Narratives of Justice in America; and Black Texts and Textuality. He lives in Durham, North Carolina. Copyright © 1997-2003 by Cave Canem Foundation, Inc. Available at: http://www.cavecanempoets.org/pages/poems/meiosis.html
Albert French Photo by Kelley Casey (see Web site listed below)	French joined the US Marine Corps in 1963 when he was 19 years old. Two years later he went to Vietnam and experienced the war at its absolute worst. Many of French's closest friends were killed; he was severely wounded. When he recovered, French returned to his hometown of Pittsburgh, tried college, and then landed a job as a photographer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. After 13 years, he left to publish his own magazine, Pittsburgh Preview. When that magazine failed in the late '80s, French fell apart emotionally. In despair, he began writing a memoir, which eventually became this primal scream of a book. During the years it took for the memoir to be accepted for publication, French (whose first cousin is the writer John Edgar Wideman) wrote and published two well-received novels: Billy (1993) and Holly (1995); neither one has anything to do with the Vietnam War. Patches of Fire has as its core French's war-zone and postwar experiences. The author tells his story in a blistering, almost stream-of-consciousness fashion, shifting the narrative adroitly between past and present. French is less concerned with providing factual detail than with painting word pictures that bring alive his deepest emotional reactions to the memorable events in his life. Information available at: http://aalbc.com/authors/albert.htm.