Lex Williford holds an M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas and has taught in the writing programs at Southern Illinois University and the University of Alabama, and was a Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Missouri, St. Louis in 2002. His novella, Balsa and Tissue Paper, is forthcoming in fall 2019 as a selection in both the Ploughshares Solos longform issue and as a single e-book; his novella in flash, Superman on the Roof, won the 2016 Rose Metal Press Flash Fiction Award book; and his book of stories, Macauley’s Thumb, won the 1993 Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Fiction, Glimmer Train Stories, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, Natural Bridge, The Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market, Poets & Writers, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Smokelong Quarterly, the Southern Review, Sou’wester, StoryQuarterly, Tameme, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Water~Stone and Witness; his stories have been anthologized in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction, Persea Books’ Sudden Flash Youth, The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-2000 and The Best of Witness: 1987-2004, The Eloquent Short Story, the Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Sleep is a Beautiful Color, the UK’s 2017 National Flash Fiction Day anthology and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Blue Mountain Center, the Centrum Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, MacDowell, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Villa Montalvo, the Wurlitzer Foundation and Yaddo. Coeditor, with Michael Martone, of the popular Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, now in its second edition, and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction, he is the founding director of the online M.F.A. program and the recent chair of the on-campus bilingual M.F.A. program at the University of Texas at El Paso.
Portrait by David Smith-Soto
