Don't Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit

HOWARD BAHR, a native of Meridian, Mississippi, is the author of The Black Flower and three other novels. He teaches at Belhaven University in Jackson, Miss.

RICK BRAGG is the author of the bestselling All Over but the Shoutin’, Ava’s Man and The Prince of Frogtown, among other books. He lives in Alabama with his family.

SONNY BREWER is the author of four novels, including The Poet of Tolstoy Park and The Widow and the Tree. He edited the anthology series Stories from the Blue Moon Café, and is working on a memoir about the day jobs in his life.

LARRY BROWN was a lifelong resident of Oxford, Mississippi. He authored two short story collections, Facing the Music and Big Bad Love; and six novels: Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son, Fay, The Rabbit Factory, and A Miracle of Catfish; as well as an autobiography, On Fire, and a collection of essays, Billy Ray’s Farm: Essays from a Place Called Tula. His work won many prizes and awards, including two Southern Book Critics Circle Awards for fiction; the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature; and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. He died in 2004. In 2005 he was posthumously inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

PAT CONROY is the author of nine books, four of which were made into award-winning motion pictures, including The Prince of Tides. He lives in the area his works praise, the low country of South Carolina.

CONNIE MAY FOWLER is the author of one memoir and six novels, including How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly and Before Women had Wings, which was the recipient of the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. She lives on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico with her husband and four dogs.

TOM FRANKLIN is the author of Poachers: Stories, Hell at the Breech, Smonk, and Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, all published by William Morrow. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, and teaches at Ole Miss.

TIM GAUTREAUX’s latest novel is The Missing (Knopf). He has published two other novels and two collections of short stories. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, and Harper’s. He lives in Louisiana and North Carolina.

WILLIAM GAY is the author of three novels, including Provinces of Night, as well as I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down, a collection of short stories. He lives in Hohenwald, Tennessee, where he is at work on a new novel.

JOHN GRISHAM is the author of a bunch of legal thrillers, two books about football, a collection of long stories, and a kids’ book.

WINSTON GROOM writes novels and histories. One of the novels was Forrest Gump. He lives with his wife, Anne-Clinton, and daughter, Carolina, in Point Clear, Alabama.

SILAS HOUSE is the bestselling author of four novels, two plays, and a work of nonfiction. He is the winner of the Appalachian Book of the Year, the Storylines Prize, two Kentucky Novel of the Year awards, the Appalachian Writer of the Year Award, and many others. He is Chair of Appalachian Studies at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.


SUZANNE HUDSON is the author of a collection of short stories; two novels; and, under the pen name Ruby Pearl Saffire, a book of humor and social commentary, Second Sluthood: A Manifesto for the Post-Menopausal, Pre-Senilic Matriarch. She lives near Fairhope, Alabama, with author Joe Formichella.

JOSHILYN JACKSON is the New York Times bestselling author of Gods in Alabama, Between, Georgia, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming, and Backseat Saints. She lives in Georgia with her husband and their children.

BARB JOHNSON’s work has appeared in such magazines as Glimmer Train, Washington Square, the Greensboro Review, Guernica and Oxford American. Her debut collection of short stories is More of This World or Maybe Another (Harper Perennial, 2009). Johnson is the recipient of a grant from A Room of Her Own Foundation, which will support the writing of her first novel. She