Life After Life (McCorkle) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—July 7, 1958
• Where—Lumberton, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina; M.A., Hollins College.
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Hillsborourgh, North Carolina

Jill Collins McCorkle is an American short story writer and novelist. She graduated from University of North Carolina, in 1980, where she studied with Max Steele, Lee Smith, and Louis D. Rubin. She obtained her M.A. from Hollins College.

Novels
McCorkle has the distinction of having her first two novels published on the same day in 1984. Of these novels, the New York Times Book Review said, “One suspects the author of The Cheer Leader is a born novelist, with July 7th, she is also a full grown one.”

Since then she has published several other novels—including Life After Life (2013) and Hieroglyphics (2020). Five of her books have been named New York Times notable books

Stories
McCorkle has also published four collections of short stories, out of which four stories have been tapped for Best American Short Stories and several collected in New Stories from the South. Her short stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Ploughshares, Oxford American, Southern Review, Narrative Magazine and American Scholar among others.

Her story “Intervention” is included in the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  An essay, “Cuss Time,” originally published in American Scholar was selected for Best American Essays. Other essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Garden and Gun, Southern Living, Our State, Allure and Real Simple.

Teaching
McCorkle has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, Tufts, and Brandeis where she was the Fannie Hurst Visiting Writer. She was a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in Fiction at Harvard for five years where she also chaired Creative Writing.

Currently,  McCorkle teaches creative writing in the MFA Program at NC State University and is a core faculty member of the Bennington College Writing Seminars. She is a frequent instructor in the Sewanee Summer Writers Program and a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Awards
New England Booksellers Award
John Dos  Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature
North Carolina Award for Literature

McCorckle lives with her husband, photographer Tom Rankin, in Hillsborough, NC.  (Adapted from Wikipedia and the author's website.)