Bret Anthony Johnston

director, creative writing, Harvard

Bret Anthony Johnston is the author of the internationally acclaimed *Corpus Christi: Stories* and the editor of *Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer*. Named a Best Book of the Year by *The Independent* of London and *The Irish Times*, *Corpus Christi: Stories* received *The Southern Review*'s Annual Short Fiction Award, the Texas Institute of Letters' Debut Fiction Award, the Christopher Isherwood Prize, and the James Michener Fellowship. His work appears in magazines such as *The Paris Review*, *The New York Times Magazine*, *Esquire*, *The Oxford American*, and *Tin House*, and in anthologies such as *New Stories from the South: The Year's Best 2003, 2004, and 2005*. He is a graduate of Miami University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and the recipient of the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He has written essays for Slate.com and is a regular contributor to NPR's *All Things Considered*. In 2006, the National Book Foundation honored him with a new National Book Award for writers under 35. A skateboarder for almost 20 years, he is currently the Director of Creative Writing at Harvard.