Fiction Faculty

Oscar Casares writes about life on the U.S.-Mexico border, but in a larger sense, he gives voice to what it means to live simultaneously in two worlds, moving amid languages, cultures, and identities. He is the author of the short story collection Brownsville (Back Bay Books 2003), which was selected by the American Library Association as a Notable Book of 2004, and is used widely at universities across the country. His first novel Amigoland (Little, Brown 2009) was the 2009 selection for the Mayor’s Book Club of Austin, a citywide reading campaign. His most recent book, Where We Come From (Knopf 2019) was described by one reviewer as a “potent novel about the complexities of immigration and the lies we tell ourselves and our families.” His fiction has earned him fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Copernicus Society of America, the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation.

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.

Peter LaSalle is the author of two novels and five short story collections, most recently Sleeping Mask (Bellevue Literary Press, 2017) and What I Found Out About Her (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), as well as two collections of essays on literature and travel, The City at Three P.M. (Dzanc Books, 2015) and The World is a Book, Indeed (LSU Press 2020). His fiction has appeared in many magazines and anthologies, such as TheParis Review, Tin House, Zoetrope, Best American Short Stories, Best of the West, Sports’ Best Short Stories, Best American Fantasy, Best American Mystery Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. His nonfiction (essays, articles, and reviews) has been published in The Nation, Africa Today, The Progressive, Commonweal, The Chicago Sun-Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Best American Travel Writing. He has received an NEA Fellowship, the Flannery O’Connor Award, the Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, and the Award for Distinguished Prose from The Antioch Review.

Elizabeth McCracken is the author of two story collections, Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry (Turtle Bay 1993) and Thunderstruck (The Dial Press 2014), winner of The Story Prize; three novels, The Giant’s House (The Dial Press 1996), a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996, Niagara Falls All Over Again (The Dial Press 2001) and Bowlaway (Ecco 2019); and a memoir, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination. She has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among other places. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among other places. The Souvenir Museum, a short story collection, was published in 2021.

Deb Olin Unferth is the author of six books, most recently, the novel Barn 8 (Graywolf 2020) and the story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance (Graywolf 2017). Her fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, Vice, the New York Times, and McSweeney’s. She has received a Guggenheim fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, a Creative Capital Grant, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She runs the Pen City Writers, a series of creative writing workshops, at the John B. Connally Unit, a prison in south Texas.