David Gates and Jill McCorkle

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIRTUALLY | David Gates and Jill McCorkle will read as part of the Writers Reading series. 

David Gates is the author of the novels Jernigan (Knopf, 1991) and Preston Falls (Knopf, 1998) and two collections of stories, The Wonders of the Visible World (Knopf, 1999) and A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me (Knopf, 2015). Gates’s fiction, articles, and reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Tin House, Granta, The Oxford American, The Journal of Country Music, and frequently in Newsweek, where he was a longtime writer and editor. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, and his books have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Gates has taught at Harvard, Columbia, the University of Virginia, Hunter College, Williams College, and The New School. He is currently teaching in the MFA program at the University of Montana.

Jill McCorkle is the author of 11 books—four story collections and seven novels—five of which have been selected as New York Times Notable Books. Her latest novel is Life After Life. Two of the stories in Going Away Shoes were included in The Best American Short Stories series. She is the winner of the New England Book Award, the John Dos Passos Prize for Excellence in Literature, and the North Carolina Award for Literature. She was a Briggs Copeland writer-in-residence at Harvard and was one of the original five core faculty members of the Bennington Writing Seminars. She currently teaches writing at North Carolina State University and lives with her husband in Hillsborough, North Carolina.