Minrose Gwin
Minrose Gwin is the author of the novels The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which received the 2020 Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction. Her fourth novel, Beautiful Dreamers, was released in 2024, prompting the assessment from Parade, “A writer’s writer, Gwin’s career is the sort other writers recognize that attention must be paid.”
She has also published a memoir, Wishing for Snow, about the collision of poetry and psychosis in her mother’s life, and four books of literary and cultural criticism, most recently Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement. She was coeditor of The Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology, and The Southern Literary Journal. She received the Society for the Study of Southern Literature Richard Beale Davis Award for Distinguished Lifetime Service to Southern Letters and the Wisdom/Faulkner Books-in-Process Award for Rescue, the novel she’s working on now.
Like the characters in her novel Promise, Minrose Gwin is a native of Tupelo, Mississippi. She began her writing career as a journalist and later taught at universities across the country, most recently the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was Kenan Eminent Professor of English. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
For more information, see minrosegwin.com.
Contact information: mgwin@email.unc.edu
Ten Things I Can’t Do Without
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- Family: blood and chosen, two-legged and four-legged
- Friends: near and far
- Memories: of good times and bad
- Trees
- A sense of humor
- Work
- Books
- Walks
- Hope for the future (currently at a low ebb)
- Good conversation
- (And I’d sure miss my TV!)