Faculty - Writers' Studio
Richard Bausch
An acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, Narrative, Gentleman's Quarterly. Playboy, The Southern Review, New Stories From the South, The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and The Pushcart Prize Stories; and they have been widely anthologized, including The Granta Book of the American Short Story and The Vintage Book of the Contemporary American Short Story.
Richard Bausch is the author of eleven novels and eight collections of stories, including the novels Rebel Powers, Violence, Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America And All The Ships At Sea, In The Night Season, Hello To The Cannibals, Thanksgiving Night, and Peace; and the story collections Spirits, The Fireman's Wife, Rare & Endangered Species, Someone To Watch Over Me, The Stories of Richard Bausch, Wives & Lovers, and most recently released Something Is Out There. His novel The Last Good Time was made into a feature-length film.
He has won two National Magazine Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lila-Wallace Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award, the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The 2004 PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story and the 2013 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence . He has been a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers since 1996. In 1999 he signed on as co-editor, with RV Cassill, of The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; since Cassill's passing in 2002, Bausch is the sole editor of that prestigious anthology. Richard Bausch teaches Creative Writing at Chapman University in Southern California.
Lucy Ellmann & Todd McEwen
Lucy Ellmann (Sweet Desserts, Dot in the Universe and Mimi) and Todd McEwen (Fisher’s Hornpipe, Who Sleeps with Katz and The Five Simple Machines) are American novelists living in Scotland. Former university lecturers in creative writing, and frequent contributors to the Guardian, New York Times, the Scottish Review of Books and the Herald, they are also influential editors through The Fiction Atelier (fictionatelier.wordpress.com).
Robert Bausch
Winner of the 2009 Dos Passos Prize for Literature, Robert Bausch says,
he has been a writer all his life. Born in Georgia, at the end of World War II, Bausch was raised in the Washington, D.C., area. In his early years he supported himself by working as a salesman - of automobiles, appliances, and hardware - and a taxi driver, waiter, production planner, and library assistant. After a stint in the military, where he taught survival, he resumed his education at George Mason University in Virginia. He worked his way through college, earning a BA and MA in English literature, and an MFA in creative writing, all at George Mason.
The citation that accompanied Bausch's Dos Passos Prize, awarded annually to an under-recognized author, lauded him for: "a rare and beautiful wayfaring imagination, one that has led him to demonstrate a simply astounding fictive range; for his ability as a literary ventriloquist, throwing his voice convincingly into so many different particularly American characters...; for the courage of his storyteller's heart as he creates not only these strikingly different characters but also risking and succeeding in wildly different ways of telling each story...; for his fearless explorations of human failure and guilt as well as the sparkling possibility of forgiveness and redemption; for a body of work both substantive and haunting...."
Bausch published his first novel, On the Way Home, in 1982. Newsweek called the novel “compelling” and it was favorably reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and other publications. Only two years later, in 1984, his second novel, The Lives of Riley Chance, was published and was praised by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. The book was later translated into Swedish. Published in 1991, Bausch's third novel, Almighty Me, also received accolades from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major newspapers. This novel was translated into German. The rights to the book were sold to Hollywood Films, a division of Disney Studios. Almighty Me was later released in film version, uncredited, as Bruce Almighty.
In 1995, Bausch published a collection of short stories called The White Rooster and Other Stories, which received the Dictionary of Literary Biography's top literary award as " the most distinguished work of fiction" for that year.
Bausch's fourth novel, A Hole in the Earth, was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and a Washington Post Favorite Book of the Year, upon its publication by Harcourt in 2001. The novel was inspired by the author's father, Robert Carl Bausch, a successful Washington businessman, who died unexpectedly in 1995 at the age of 79. Commenting on his novel, Bausch has said, “I tried to put everything my father believed in that book...out of respect for him and because, as my narrator comes to see, he was right about most things.” Bausch likes to say he comes from a “functional” family, one that was happy and remained close. In addition to four other brothers and sisters, Baush has an identical twin brother, the novelist Richard Bausch. Their parents, Helen and Robert Bausch, were staunch Catholics and life-time Democrats, who were happily married for fifty-five years.
In October 2002, Bausch's fifth novel, The Gypsy Man, was published by Harcourt, followed by a paperback edition under the imprint of Harvest Books. His next novel, Out of Season, was published in the fall of 2005 and, once again, Bausch's fiction was honored with the coveted designation of Favorite Book of the Year by the Washington Post. On the faculty of Northern Virginia Community College since 1976, Bausch has been a college professor, teaching creative writing, American literature, world literature, humanities, philosophy, and expository writing, for most of his professional career. He has also taught at the University of Virginia, American University, George Mason University, and Johns Hopkins University. Bausch was a director on the board of the Pen-Faulkner Foundation and now serves happily as an advisor to the literary magazine "Peeks and Valleys," which publishes new writing from some of the best and most promising new young practitioners of fiction and poetry.