John Edgar Wideman

John Edgar Wideman is a highly acclaimed literary fiction author from the United States. He was born in Washington D.C. in 1941 but moved to the African American community of Homewood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania when he was just a year old. This community would later become the setting for much of his fiction work.

Wideman grew up in Pittsburgh and attended the prestigious Peabody High School, where it was discovered that he was not only good in sports but also an excellent student. He went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where he became an All-Ivy League forward on the basketball team. He was the second African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship and graduated from New College, Oxford University, England in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Wideman is a widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards. He is the first author to win the International PEN/Faulkner Award twice, in 1984 for "Sent for You Yesterday" and in 1990 for "Philadelphia Fire." In 2000, he won the O. Henry Award for his short story "Weight," published in The Callaloo Journal. His nonfiction book "Brothers and Keepers" received a National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant and was chosen as the winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. His novel "The Cattle Killing" won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction in 1997. He has taught at the University of Wyoming, University of Pennsylvania, where he founded and chaired the African American Studies Department, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's MFA Program for Poets & Writers. He currently teaches at Brown University and sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.