Bestselling, award-winning author Eli Cranor played quarterback at every level: peewee to professional.

During his time at Ouachita, Cranor double majored in Political Science and English Literature while earning all-conference honors as OBU's quarterback. He went on to set school records for offensive production, two of which still stand today. Cranor originally thought he would pursue law school after graduation but ended up in Sweden playing professional football where he led the Carlstad Crusaders to a national championship. After that year-long journey, he traveled back to Arkansas to coach high school football.

Following a five-year coaching career, Cranor turned his attention to writing, garnering awards from The Missouri Review in 2018 and The Greensboro Review in 2017. During 2019 and 2020, he wrote a series of football-themed essays for Oxford American called "Hash Marks." Shortly thereafter, he began penning a nationally syndicated sports column titled "Athletic Support."

In 2022, Cranor's debut novel, Don't Know Tough, won the Peter Lovesey First Crime Novel Contest and the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel. Originally penned in 2017, the manuscript collected over two-hundred rejections before being named one of the best novels of the year by the New York Times and USA Today.

Cranor's next two novels, Ozark Dogs and Broiler, were published in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Both made numerous year-end lists, including the New York Times, The Guardian, and Amazon's "Best Books of the Year."

Cranor now serves as the "Writer in Residence" at Arkansas Tech, where he also lends his eye-and sometimes, his arm-to the university's football team, an experience he mined while drafting his forthcoming novel, Mississippi Blue 42.