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This author appeared at the 2009 festival. Please view the list of authors appearing at this year's festival or see our suggestions for similar authors below.
 Brad Gooch
Readers of Flannery O'Connor's warped canonical short stories might be tempted to assume that the pioneer of "Southern Grotesque" fiction was a recluse; biographer Brad Gooch, author of the acclaimed City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara disproves this notion with Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. Displaying signs of a distinct personality even at a young age, O'Connor was filmed with a pet bantam chicken she'd taught to walk backwards when she was four. Before turning "a very ancient twelve," as she called herself, O’Connor wrote her first satire, entitled "My Relatives," which hit so unnervingly close to home that many family members spurned any resemblance to their actual characters. Gooch deftly intertwines biographical information with his own insights on the connections between significant events in O'Connor's life and thinly veiled references to said events. The Associated Press states that "Gooch does a brilliant job of resurrecting on the page this major American writer and idiosyncratic woman with all her tart humor, intense talent, and powerful religious commitment some 44 years after her untimely death." Though she was fiercely protected as an only child and later returned to Andalusia, Georgia to live with her mother once Lupus had begun to wreak havoc on her system, the image of a recluse is not one that accurately portrays the enigmatic author outlined in Flannery. As a life long lover of birds, a prominent and witty cartoonist in her heyday at Georgia State College for Women, and close friend to many including the poet Robert Lowell, O'Connor lived a tragically short but brilliant life. A recipient of the National Endowment for the Humanities and Guggenheim fellowships, Gooch is a professor of English at William Patterson University in New Jersey.
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