John Wideman

educator, novelist, biographer

John Edgar Wideman is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His articles on Malcolm X, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Michael Jordan, Emmett Till, Thelonius Monk, and women's professional basketball have appeared in* The New Yorker*, *Vogue*, *Esquire*, *Emerge*, and *the New York Times Magazine*. He was awarded a Benjamin Franklin scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania, where he not only won a creative writing prize but also earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Matching his scholastic achievements with his athletic ones, he won All-Ivy League status as a forward on the basketball team and successfully competed on the track team. In 1963, he graduated with a B.A. in English, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford University's New College. Returning to the United States in 1966, Wideman spent a year as a Kent Fellow at the University of lowa's Writers' Workshop, where he completed his first novel, *A Glance Away*, in 1967. His other novels include *Two Cities*,* Hurry Home*, *The Lynchers*, *Hiding Place*, *Sent for You Yesterday*, *Philadelphia Fire*, and *The Cattle Killing*. He is the author of a memoir, *Brothers and Keepers*. Wideman is the only writer to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice-- once in 1984 for his novel *Sent for You Yesterday* and again in 1990 for *Philadelphia Fire*. In 1990, he also received the American Book Award for Fiction. He was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 1991 and the MacArthur Award in 1993.