Bobbie Ann Mason
Photo courtesy of Viking Penguin

Widely touted as a major literary voice chronicling the changing landscape of the contemporary South, Bobbie Ann Mason was raised on her father’s dairy farm outside Mayfield, Kentucky. She took her first writing job at a local newspaper, the Mayfield Messenger, in 1960, and went on to receive degrees from the University of Kentucky, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the University of Connecticut. Her first volume of fiction, Shiloh and Other Stories (1982), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the American Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award and earned her the 1983 Ernest Hemmingway Foundation Award for best first fiction. She used her 1983 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship to write her first novel, In Country (1985), which explores a high school girl’s quest for knowledge about her father, who died in Vietnam just before she was born. In 1989, the novel was adapted into a critically acclaimed film directed by Norman Jewison and starring Bruce Willis. Mason’s other books include the novels Spence + Lila (1988) and Feather Crowns (1993); the memoir Clear Springs (1999) a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and a biography in the Penguin Lives Series Elvis Presley (2003). She is the University of Kentucky’s Writer-in-Residence.

"At the bottom of the wall is a granite trough, and on the edge of it the sunlight reflects the names just above, in mirror writing, upside down. Flower arrangements are scattered at the base. A little kid says, "Look, Daddy, the flowers are dying." The man snaps, "Some are and some aren't.""

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