J. A. Bernstein

J. A. is the author of Rachel's Tomb, which won the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Award Series Novel Prize and Hackney Award; Desert Castles, which won the Wilhelmus Prize at Southern Indiana Review; Northern Cowboy, which won the Wilt Prize; Glass Essays; and a forthcoming book, Afterlight. His stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Tin House, McSweeney's, Washington Square, Boston Review, and Chicago Quarterly, among others, and won honors from The Atlantic and Crab Orchard Review. His academic articles have appeared in The Conradian, Western American Literature, and other volumes, and won the Harkness Award from the Joseph Conrad Society of America. A Chicago native, he studied Middle Eastern History and Arabic at Brown University and in Jordan as a Fulbright Scholar then worked in human rights in the Middle East. Currently, he is Director of Graduate Studies in English and an associate professor at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he teaches creative writing. The former fiction editor of Tikkun Magazine and the president of the United Faculty Senates Association of Mississippi, he lives with his wife and three children in Hattiesburg.