The Center for Writers The University of Southern Mississippi

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Frederick Barthelme, Fiction
Director of the Center for Writers
Professor of English

M.A. The Johns Hopkins University

Frederick Barthelme is author of fourteen books including Moon Deluxe, Second Marriage, Tracer, Two Against One, Natural Selection, The Brothers, Painted Desert, and Bob the Gambler. He is an occasional contributor to The New Yorker and has published in GQ, Kansas Quarterly, Epoch, Playboy, Esquire, TriQuarterly, North American Review, Frank, and elsewhere. His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, released in November 1999, was co-authored with his brother Steven. A retrospective collection of stories, The Law of Averages, was published by Counterpoint in November 2000 and released in paperback in August 2001. His novel, Elroy Nights, was published in October 2003 by Counterpoint, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was one of five finalists for the 2004 PEN/Faulkner Award.

Angela Ball, Poetry
Professor of English

B.A. Ohio University
M.F.A. University of Iowa
Ph.D. University of Denver

Angela Ball is a prize-winning poet and author of Kneeling Between Parked Cars and Possession. Her book, Quartet, was released in 1995 by Carnegie Mellon University Press, and her most recent collection of poems, The Museum of the Revolution: 58 Exhibits, was published in 1999 by Carnegie Mellon. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals  including The New Yorker, Partisan Review, New Republic, Field, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Chelsea, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Poetry, and Grand Street. Her work was included in Best American Poetry 2001, and she has represented U.S. at the Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, and the Colombian International Poetry Festival, Bogotá. Angela Ball has received grants from the Mississippi Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Steven Barthelme, Fiction, Nonfiction
Professor of English

B.A. University of Texas at Austin
M.A. The Johns Hopkins University

Steven Barthelme publishes widely in literary magazines; he has a story collection, And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, and he won Pushcart Prizes in 1993 and 2005. His nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Texas Observer, Elle Decor, and elsewhere, and his fiction has been widely published in, among many others, McSweeney's, Yale Review, and The Atlantic Monthly (read his Atlantic story "Heaven" here).  His memoir, Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss, co-authored with his brother, was released by Houghton Mifflin in November 1999. In 2004 he won the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award for a story published in Yale Review.

Julia Johnson, Poetry
Assistant Professor of English

B.A. Hollins University
M.F.A. University of Virginia

Julia Johnson, a native of New Orleans, was a Henry Hoyns Fellow at the University of Virginia, where she took her M.F.A. in 1995. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Third Coast, Poetry International, 64, and New Orleans Review. Her first book of poems, Naming the Afternoon, was published by the Louisiana State University Press in 2002. She has been awarded an Academy of American Poets Prize three times and is the winner of the Fellowship of Southern Writers' 2003 New Writing Award. She has taught as an assistant professor at Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia, the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, and elsewhere.