A writer with “a virtuosic gift” (The New York Times Book Review), Bret Anthony Johnston is the internationally bestselling author of Encounters with Unexpected Animals: Stories, the novels We Burn Daylight and Remember Me Like This, and the multi-award-winning collection Corpus Christi: Stories. According to The San Francisco Chronicle, “Johnston’s genius lies in weaving a web of optimism around a series of difficult topics,” and Italy’s il manifesto hailed Remember Me Like This as “one of the most intense and engaging [novels] of the new millennium.” He edited Naming the World and Other Exercises for the Creative Writer and wrote the documentary film Waiting for Lightning, which was released in theaters around the world by Samuel Goldwyn Films. Among his many honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, the Glasgow Prize, the Jesse H. Jones Award, and The Sunday Times Short Story Award, “the world’s richest and most prestigious prize for a single short story.” His work has been widely translated and appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Esquire, The Paris Review, The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Best American Short Stories, and elsewhere.

After selling his television to buy his first board over 40 years ago, Bret has yet to outgrow skateboarding. After directing the creative writing program at Harvard University for over a decade, he is now the Director of the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin where he holds the Mari Sabusawa Regents Chair in Writing.