Stephen Dixon

Bio

Stephen Dixon (1936-2019) grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with six siblings. Before he became a college professor at the age of 43, he worked as a school bus driver, a bartender, a systems analyst, an artist’s model, a middle school teacher, a department store clerk, and a reporter in Washington, D.C., where he interviewed John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Nikita Khrushchev, and L.B.J., among others. He taught at Johns Hopkins University for 27 years. He is the author of 18 novels and 17 short story collections and published over 600 stories in his lifetime. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment of the Arts grants. He was also a two-time National Book Award nominee—for his novels Frog and Interstate—and his work was selected for four O. Henry Prizes, two Best American selections, three Pushcart Prizes, one Best Stories of the South, two stories in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, and possibly others he was too modest to list. He passed away on November 6th, 2019, at the age of 83.