About James Nolan

James Nolan is a widely published fiction writer, essayist, poet, and translator. His most recent books are You Don’t Know Me: New and Selected Stories (winner of the the 2015 Independent Publishers Gold Medal in Southern Fiction) and the poetry collection Drunk on Salt. His novel Higher Ground was awarded a Faulkner-Wisdom Gold Medal and the 2012 Independent Publishers Gold Medal in Southern Fiction. Perpetual Care: Stories won the the 2009 Next-Generation Indie Book Award for Best Short Story Collection. Recent short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Shenandoah, Callaloo, Arkansas Review, and the anthology New Orleans Noir. He is a frequent memoir contributor to Boulevard, and other essays have come out in North American Review, Utne, Gastronomica, the Washington Post, St. Petersburg Times, and the Times-Picayune.

His previous collections of poetry are Why I Live in the Forest and What Moves Is Not the Wind, both from Wesleyan University Press. He has translated Pablo Neruda’s Stones of the Sky (Copper Canyon Press) and Longing: Selected Poems of Jaime Gil de Biedma (City Lights Books). He is the author of Poet-Chief (University of New Mexico Press) and a collection of his essays, Fumadores en manos de un dios enfurecido, has come out in Spain (Enigma Editores). His Ph.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley, and he has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two Fulbright Fellowships. He has taught literature and creative writing at universities in San Francisco, Florida, Barcelona, Madrid, and Beijing. More recently he has been Writer-in-Residence at both Tulane and Loyola universities in his native New Orleans, where for many years he has taught writing workshops based at Loyola and the Arts Council.