We are proud and happy to welcome Jacinda Townsend and Pinckney Benedict to our faculty at SIUC.



About Pinckney Benedict:

Nationally known fiction writer Pinckney Benedict is the author of a novel, Dogs of God, and two collections of short stories. Among other awards, he is a recipient of the prestigious Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, as well as a James Michener Fellowship.

About Jacinda Townsend:

Jacinda Townsend was a 2003–2004 Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing and a 2002 Hurston Wright Award finalist. She has published in numerous literary magazines, and her work has been anthologized in O. Henry Festival Stories and Telling Stories: Fiction by Kentucky Feminists. A former Fulbright fellow, she is a graduate of both Harvard University and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.