According to Wendell Brock, in her acclaimed novels and short story collections, the Mississippi writer Ellen Gilchrist “taps the human heart with unmistakable empathy — and unerring humor.” She was born on February 20, 1935, near Vicksburg, Mississippi, ** in Issaquena County. Her parents were  Aurora (Alford) and William Garth Gilchrist. At the age of fourteen, she wrote a column called “Chit and Chat About This and That” for a local Franklin, Kentucky, paper.  She attended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she received a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy. At nineteen, Gilchrist married Marshall Walker, an engineering student, and they had three children.  When she divorced Walker, she enrolled in a creative writing course at Millsaps College in Jackson, where she was taught by Eudora Welty. She also studied creative writing at the University of Arkansas, where today she is a faculty member. Ellen Gilchrist’s first collection of short stories, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, was published by the University of Arkansas Press in 1981 and reissued in hardcover and paperback by Little, Brown and Company in 1985. Her first novel,  The Annunciation, was published in 1983, and her second collection of short stories, Victory Over Japan, for which she received the National Book Award for Fiction, was published in 1984. She now has more than seventeen books of her work published. Ellen Gilchrist has received numerous awards, including the Mississippi Arts Festival Poetry Award; the New York Quarterly Craft in Poetry Award; the National Endowment of the Arts Grant in Fiction; and the Mississippi Academy of Arts and Science Award for Fiction. In addition, she has received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Literature Award three times for the books In the Land of Dreamy Dreams, Victory Over Japan, and I Cannot Get You Close Enough. Ellen Gilchrist continues to teach in the Creative Writing and Translation program of the Department of English at the University of Arkansas. Her book The Writing Life was published by The University Press of Mississippi in 2005 and Nora Jane: A Life in Stories was published by Little Brown also in 2005. Her novel, A Dangerous Age, was published in 2008. It is the story of three women of the Hand family who are cousins in a “Southern dynasty rich with history and tradition who are no strangers to either controversy or sadness,” according to the publisher Algonquin of Chapel Hill. Other more recent works include Acts of God (2014), Ellen Gilchrist: Collected Stories (2009), Nora Jane: A Life in Stories (2005), and I, Rhoda Manning, Go Hunting with My Daddy, And Other Stories** (2003). She has been married and divorced four times (two to the same man) and has three children. Although Gilchrist presently lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas, she maintains a house in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, as well.

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