Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally bestselling author of Encounters with Unexpected Animals: Stories, We Burn Daylight, Remember Me Like This, and Corpus Christi: Stories. He is the editor of Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer, and he wrote the documentary film, Waiting for Lightning. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. His many honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and The Sunday Times Short Story Award, the world’s “richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story.”

After selling his television to buy his first board over 40 years ago, Bret has yet to outgrow skateboarding. After directing the creative writing program at Harvard University for over a decade, he is now the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin where he holds the Mari Sabusawa Regents Chair in Writing.