Famous Writers I Have Known (Magnuson) - Author Bio

Author Bio
James Magnuson is the author of eight previous novels in addition to his new 2014 Famous Writers I Have Known. He is a former Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship for his fiction, and the winner of the Jesse Jones Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Magnuson currently directs the James A. Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. (From the publisher.)

In his words:
Some thirty-plus years ago, I was a totally broke playwright in New York. One June weekend I went to a wedding in the far reaches of the Catskills and caught a ride back to Manhattan with a young Princeton professor of African Religion. Somewhere along the Taconic Parkway, he asked me what I did, and I spent a half hour telling him about the one-acts I'd been putting on in various churches and street theaters in East Harlem.

Two weeks later he called and asked if he could nominate me for an award. What award is that, I wanted to know. It's an award for promising young writers and scholars, he said. I certainly was unknown and whether or not I was promising was open to debate, but I spent a weekend filling out the application form he sent me. . . . (Read more on the author's website.)