George Singleton
Born in Anaheim, CA in 1958, George Singleton grew up in Greenwood, SC. In 1980, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa at Furman University with a philosophy degree. In 1986, he received an MFA at UNC Greensboro then taught fiction-writing for thirteen years at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville.
In 2001, Singleton’s first collection of short stories, These People Are Us, won praise for its style, described by National Public Radio as “without sentimentality or stereotype but with plenty of sharp-witted humor.” In an interview with NPR’s David Molpus, Singleton explained, "Grits never show up in my stories. Pork rinds might, not grits. Guns, they don't show up a whole lot. Rebel flags don't unless I'm kind of making fun of them. . . . I'll probably get a cross burned on my lawn for saying that.”
Many of Singleton’s settings and characters overlap from collection to collection, but all his work illustrates his commitment to a particular worldview that he settled on early in his career, vowing to “try to write about how the saddest moments can be the funniest.” Andrew Geyer describes another tendency in Singleton’s approach, linking him to Faulkner and other writers who create “fictional worlds of [their] own.”
In 2009, Singleton received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two years later the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Singleton was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2104 and received the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence in 2015. He now holds the John C. Cobb Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Wofford College.
Hub City Press released his You Want More: Selected Stories in 2020, which includes work from These People Are Us and the additional six collections of short stories that appeared between that collection and the new volume: The Half-Mammals of Dixie (2003), Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood (2013), Drowning in Gruel (2006), Stray Decorum (2012), Between Wrecks (2014), and Calloustown (2015). Singleton is also the author of two novels: Novel (2006) and Work Shirts for Madmen (2007), as well as a nonfiction book titled Pep Talks, Warnings, And Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom And Cautionary Advice For Writers (2008).
In 2001, Singleton’s first collection of short stories, These People Are Us, won praise for its style, described by National Public Radio as “without sentimentality or stereotype but with plenty of sharp-witted humor.” In an interview with NPR’s David Molpus, Singleton explained, "Grits never show up in my stories. Pork rinds might, not grits. Guns, they don't show up a whole lot. Rebel flags don't unless I'm kind of making fun of them. . . . I'll probably get a cross burned on my lawn for saying that.”
Many of Singleton’s settings and characters overlap from collection to collection, but all his work illustrates his commitment to a particular worldview that he settled on early in his career, vowing to “try to write about how the saddest moments can be the funniest.” Andrew Geyer describes another tendency in Singleton’s approach, linking him to Faulkner and other writers who create “fictional worlds of [their] own.”
In 2009, Singleton received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two years later the Hillsdale Award for Fiction from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Singleton was inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers in 2104 and received the John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence in 2015. He now holds the John C. Cobb Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Wofford College.
Hub City Press released his You Want More: Selected Stories in 2020, which includes work from These People Are Us and the additional six collections of short stories that appeared between that collection and the new volume: The Half-Mammals of Dixie (2003), Why Dogs Chase Cars: Tales of a Beleaguered Boyhood (2013), Drowning in Gruel (2006), Stray Decorum (2012), Between Wrecks (2014), and Calloustown (2015). Singleton is also the author of two novels: Novel (2006) and Work Shirts for Madmen (2007), as well as a nonfiction book titled Pep Talks, Warnings, And Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom And Cautionary Advice For Writers (2008).