Author Minrose Gwin from Tupelo Mississippi

MAJOR WORKS BIOGRAPHY REVIEWS RELATED WEBSITES BIBLIOGRAPHY

Author Minrose Gwin standing behind a mulberry tree

Author Minrose Gwin. Photo by Ruth Salvaggio. Used with permission

Major Works

Fiction

The Accidentals (2019)
Promise (2018)
The Queen of Palmyra (2010)

Non-fiction

Remembering Medgar Evers: Writing the Long Civil Rights Movement (Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures Ser.) Feb 25, 2013
The Woman in the Red Dress: Gender, Space, and Reading (May 3, 2002)
The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference (Jan 1, 1990)
Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (Nov 1, 1985)
The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, 1st Edition, by William L. Andrews (Editor), Minrose C. Gwin (Editor), Trudier Harris (Editor), Fred Hobson (Editor)

Memoir

Wishing for Snow (2004)

Biography of Author Minrose Gwin

Early Life

Author Minrose Gwin standing in front of hot air balloons

Author Minrose Gwin, photo courtesy of the author

Mississippi writer Minrose Clayton Gwin was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1945 where she was raised by her mother, Erin Taylor Clayton Pitner. Gwin was raised by grandparents in Tupelo until age 7, when her mother remarried. Her mother was a poet who became mentally ill and later died of cancer. Gwin’s memoir, Wishing for Snow, is the story of her relationship with her mother.

Education

Gwin received both her MA and PhD in English from the University of Tennessee.

Awards & Work

Gwin is the author of three novels: The Queen of Palmyra, a Barnes Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award; Promise, which was shortlisted for the Willie Morris Award in Southern Literature; and The Accidentals, which is the 2020 winner of the Mississippi Institute for Arts and Letters Award in Fiction.

A writer all of her working life, Gwin started out as a newspaper and wire service reporter working in Mobile, Atlanta, Nashville, as well as Knoxville.

She became a teacher of English and creative writing at various universities that included the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of New Mexico, the State University of New York in Birmingham, and Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. She taught for many years at the University of New Mexico Writers Conference in Taos and Santa Fe.

Her interests have included studies in racial violence, trauma, and cultural memory during the period of the civil rights movement. She is also a Faulkner scholar.

Gwin has written a total of eight books: three novels, a memoir, and four scholarly books focusing on social justice issues. She also co-edited The Literature of the American South.

Minrose Gwin sitting in a chair holding a book with a trumpet creeper vine flowering behind her