Clint McCown

Profile

Clint McCown’s novels include The Member-Guest (Doubleday), War Memorials (Graywolf and Houghton Mifflin), The Weatherman (Graywolf), and Haints (New Rivers Press). He has written one story collection, Music for Hard Times (Press 53), and a craft book, Mr. Potato Head vs. Freud: Lessons on the Craft of Writing Fiction (Press 53).

He is the only two-time winner of the American Fiction Prize; other honors include the Midwest Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great Writers designation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Distinction in Literature citation from the Wisconsin Library Association, the Germaine Breé Book Award, and an Academy of American Poets Prize. He has received three Notable Essay citations in the Best American Essays series. The former editor of Indiana Review and the founding editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal, he served four years as general editor of the AWP Intro Journals Project. His work has appeared in more than 75 national magazines. In addition, he has published five collections of poems, and has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. and as a creative consultant for HBO television. Three of his plays have been produced. He also received an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of Organized Crime. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts low-residency MFA program. In 2021, he was inducted into the Writers Hall of Fame at Wake Forest University.