The Kelly Writers House Fellows Program
Richard Ford

February 13-14, 2006

"Richard Ford's power lies in the deceiving simplicity of his language, in the complexity of the emotions he explores, and in the extraordinary tenderness with which most of the people in his stories go about the solitary business of loving, and seeking love. His stories are exemplars of the form. For their clarity, for their unfailing grace, their intellectual beauty, they deserve to be celebrated." -- The 1995 Rea Award Committee A leading figure among American writers of the post-World War II generation, Richard Ford is the author of many novels, collections of short stories, and dramas. Independence Day (1995), the sequel to The Sportswriter (1986), was the first novel ever to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Among numerous other honors, Ford has been a Guggenheim fellow (1977-78), a two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow (1979-1980, 1985-1986), a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and winner of the 1995 Rea Award, which is given annually to a writer who has made a significant contribution to the short story as an art form. His short stories have been widely anthologized and have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Granta. His most recent publications include short story collections Women With Men (1997) and A Multitude of Sins (2002). While Ford is known for writing about the South, he continues to challenge existing notions of regional literature. "Personally, I don't think there is such a thing a Southern writing or Southern literature or Southern ethos," Ford has said. Instead, he works toward understanding the complexities of American culture as a whole.