Tom Franklin
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Writer; and Associate Professor of English, University of Mississippi

Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow in Fiction - Class of Fall 2016

Tom Franklin teaches in the University of Mississippi’s MFA program. He was born and raised in Dickinson, Alabama, received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Arkansas, and his BA and MA from the University of South Alabama. He is the author of Poachers (William Morrow, 1999), Hell at the Breech (2003), and Smonk (2006). The Tilted World (2014), written collaboratively with his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly, is set during the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927.

 

Franklin’s work has been recognized with literary awards including a Guggenheim fellowship, Philip Roth Residency in Creative Writing, and the Willie Morris Prize for Southern Fiction. Franklin’s books have won an Edgar Award, appeared in Best American Mystery Stories of the Century, and won a Los Angeles Times’ Book Prize (mystery/thriller). Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (2010) was nominated for nine awards and won five, including the Gold Dagger Award for Best Novel.

Project Description

Untitled Novel

If there is a thread that runs through Franklin’s books – beyond their Southern setting – it is that they all strive to blend what the author loves of high literature – compellingly complex characters and felicitously crafted sentences – with what he loved reading as a young person: the horror novels of Stephen King or the fantasy novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. At the Academy, Franklin will work on a hybrid novel, set in rural Alabama. “This is the land where I grew up, a place at the bottom of the bottom, dirt roads, deep woods, rivers and gravel pits, a place deeply imprinted upon my imagination,” he writes. “My stories are set not in the mythological South of moonlight and magnolias but in the blue collar, rural, industrial South. It’s the South I experienced as a first-generation college student who earned a BA at night while working days in a hospital morgue, a sandblasting grit company, and a chemical waste plant, the son of a mechanic in a deeply, almost perversely, religious culture.”

Academy Activities

19 Nov 16

Accidentally Autobiographical: The American South in South America

Tom Franklin’s lecture features readings from and a discussion of his New York Times bestselling 2010 novel Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. This book, Franklin says, is “accidentally autobiographical,” in that the author had few plans to use aspects and details of his own life. But ...

Read more
07 Jan 17

The Fall 2016 Berlin Journal on NPR Berlin

This edition of the American Academy’s “Berlin Journal” show on NPR Berlin (airdate January 7 & 9, 2017) features interviews with fiction writer Tom Franklin, historian Rebecca Boehling, geographer Michael Watts, medievalist Alex Novikoff, and the Academy’s director of pr ...

Read more
Back To Top