Michael Gills

A first generation college student, Michael Gills earned the B.A. from the University of Arkansas where he twice won McKean prizes for poetry and the Fulbright Departmental Prize for fiction. He was Randall Jarrell Fellow in the M.F.A Program at University of North Carolina Greensboro, and received the Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah. His first collection of short fiction, Why I Lie, was published by University of Nevada Press/2002. It won a Utah Book Prize and was chosen as a top literary debut by The Southern Review. A novel, Go Love, came out in Fall 2011 from Raw Dog Screaming Press. A second story collection, The Death of Bonnie and Clyde, was published by Texas Review Press in February 2012, the title story of which won Southern Humanities Review's Hoepfner Prize for the best story published there in 2010. Part One of a two part collection of essays, White Indians, was published in Fall 2013 by Raw Dog Screaming Press, and Part Two, Finisterre, is forthcoming in 2020. The House Across From The Deaf School, a third collection of short fiction, was published by Texas Review Press in fall 2016, and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and won a Utah Book Prize. Emergency Instructions, Book I of the Go Love Quartet came out in 2017 from Raw Dog Screaming Press, and the third book of the quartet, West, was published in 2019. Gills is a Distinguished Professor of Writing for the Honors College at the University of Utah, where he teaches one of the nation's only year-long novel writing workshops for undergraduates. His collected papers are archived and available for research as The Michael Gills Papers, Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC, USA.