Clint McCown

Clint McCown was born in 1952 in Fayetteville, TN, but grew up in Birmingham, AL and Gettysburg, PA. The son of a Secret Service agent, in his teens he was yardboy for former President Dwight D. Eisenhower. After graduating from Wake Forest University, he studied acting at the Circle-in-the Square in NYC and subsequently toured with the National Shakespeare Company and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre. He worked as a broadcast journalist in 1978 and received the Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of Organized Crime and political corruption. After receiving his MFA from Indiana University, where he served as editor of Indiana Review, he taught for 20 years at Beloit College, where he also served as founding editor and publisher of the Beloit Fiction Journal. Several of his plays have been produced; he has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. and a Creative Consultant for HBO television. He is currently head of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University and a faculty member for the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program. His novels include The Member-Guest, War Memorials, The Weatherman, and Haints; his poetry collections include Sidetracks, Labyrinthiad, Wind Over Water, Dead Languages, Total Balance Farm, and The Dictionary of Unspellable Noises: New & Selected Poems, 1975-2018. The only two-time winner of the American Fiction Prize, he is also a past recipient of the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers designation, a Distinction in Literature citation from the Wisconsin Library Association, the Germaine Breé Book Award, an NEA grant, and two Notable Essay citations from the Best American Essays series. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in over seventy-five anthologies, journals, and magazines.