Joe Ashby Porter is the author of the novels Eelgrass (New Directions) and Resident Aliens (New Amsterdam/Ivan R. Dee) and the collections Touch Wood: Short Stories (Turtle Point), The Kentucky Stories (Johns Hopkins), both Pulitzer prize nominees, and Lithuania: Short Stories (Johns Hopkins). His short stories have appeared in Antaeus, Fiction, Fiction International, Harper's, Ploughshares, Raritan, Triquarterly, The Yale Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, and other periodicals. His fiction has been reprinted in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, The Store of Joys: Writers Celebrate the Fiftieth Anniversary of the N. C. Museum of Art, God: Stories, Contemporary American Fiction, This Is Where We Live: Short Stories by 25 North Carolina Writers, So the Story Goes: Twenty-Five years of the Johns Hopkins Short Fiction Series, and other anthologies. His awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships and a 2004 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for "writers of exceptional accomplishment in any genre," with the citation "From his brilliantly comic first novel onward, Joe Ashby Porter has entered the fiction lists with splendid exhibits in virtually every event or genre--more widely diverse novels and haunting short stories and sketches. No writer of his gifted generation has shown greater daring or has earned higher praise." Porter has taught fiction writing at Virginia, at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and at Duke, where he is Professor and Associate Chair of English. He has served as Writer-in-Residence at Brown and at the Université François Rabelais in Tours. His fiction is taught at universities including Duke, Brown, and the Sorbonne. His alter ego, Shakespearean Joseph A. Porter, is author or editor of many scholarly books and articles.