Stephanie Powell Watts

Stephanie Powell Watts won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for her debut story collection, We Are Taking Only What We Need (2012), also named one of 2013’s Best Summer Reads by O: The Oprah Magazine. Pulitzer-prize winning author of The Known World Edward P. Jones calls the collection "an impressive debut that promises only wonderful work to come"

Ms. Powell Watts’s stories explore the lives of African Americans in fast food and factory jobs, working door to door as Jehovah’s Witness ministers, and pressing against the boundaries of the small town, post-integration South. Her debut novel, No One Is Coming to Save Us, follows the return of a successful native son to his home in North Carolina and his attempt to join the only family he ever wanted but never had. “Imagine The Great Gatsby set in rural North Carolina, nine decades later, with desperate black people.”

Born in the foothills of North Carolina, with a PhD from the University of Missouri, she now lives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where she is an associate professor at Lehigh University.

 

For more about Stephanie and her works, go to http://stephaniepowellwatts.com/