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2009—If All of Rochester Read the Same Book…

Author Bio

Tony Earley: A Biography

Tony Earley was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1961 and raised in Redford County, North Carolina. After graduating from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English in 1983, he worked as a newspaper reporter and editor in North Carolina for nearly four years, first as a general assignment reporter for The Thermal Belt News Journal in Columbus, and later as a sports editor and feature writer for The Daily Courier in Forest City. Earley then went on to earn a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

Earley’s first published works were short stories that were printed in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Oxford-American and numerous literary magazines. Earley was included on Granta’s list of the 20 Best Young American Novelists and was named one of America’s top 20 young fiction writers by The New Yorker. His work has been anthologized in numerous collections including New Stories from the American South and has twice been included in Best American Short Stories. His first book was the story collection Here We Are in Paradise (1994), in which the character Jim Glass (from Jim the Boy) first appears. His collection of essays and autobiographical reflections, Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True, was published in 2001. Jim the Boy, Earley’s first novel, was published in 2000. The Blue Star, the sequel to Jim the Boy published in 2008, was included as one of the New York Times’ best books of the year. Earley has won several awards including a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and a National Magazine Award for fiction.

Earley lives with his wife and daughter in Nashville, Tennessee, where he is the Samuel Milton Fleming Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Bibliography of Books by Tony Earley

Here We Are in Paradise (1994): stories

Jim the Boy (2000): novel

Somehow Form a Family: Stories That Are Mostly True (2001): personal essays

The Blue Star (2008): novel (sequel to Jim the Boy)

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