Madison Smartt Bell is the award-winning author of short-story collections, novellas, five works of nonfiction, and nineteen works of fiction. His All Souls' Rising won of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pen/Faulkner Prize. He won a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a professor of English at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland.