Alice McDermott

Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy, winner of the National Book Award, and That Night, At Weddings and Wakes, and After This, which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby?: Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and other publications. She lives outside Washington, DC.

Suzanne Marrs, Professor Emerita of English at Millsaps College where she taught for 27 years, received the 1998 Phoenix Award for Outstanding Welty Scholarship from the Eudora Welty Society and the 2004 Distinguished Professor Award from Millsaps; she was Mississippi’s Humanities Scholar of the Year in 2009. Marrs is the author of Eudora Welty, A Biography, and of One Writer’s Imagination: The Fiction of Eudora Welty as well as being the editor of What There Is to Say We Have Said: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and William Maxwell. In 2005, her biography of Welty was named an Editor’s Choice by the New York Times Book Review and a Top Ten Biography by Booklist; her study of Welty’s fiction was a 2002 Choice Outstanding Academic Title, and her edition of the Welty/Maxwell letters was named one of 2011’s best books by the Chicago Tribune. Marrs’s most recent publication is Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald (July 2015), which she co-edited with Tom Nolan and which has received outstanding notices.

Marrs met Eudora Welty in 1983, and they became good friends; once Marrs moved from the State University of New York – Oswego to Welty’s hometown of Jackson, MS, the two met on an almost daily basis, discussing literature and travel, exchanging anecdotes, and welcoming visiting writers and scholars to the Mississippi capital.

Though she has now retired from the faculty of Millsaps College, Marrs continues to serve as Welty Foundation Scholar-in-Residence at the Eudora Welty House and has a number of book projects in the offing.