Allen Wier

Allen Wier (pronounced Wire) has published four novels:  Tehano (Southern Methodist University Press, 2006),  A Place for Outlaws (Harper & Row, 1989), Departing as Air (Simon & Schuster, 1983), and Blanco (LSU Press 1978, Avon/Bard 1980, and Harper & Row 1989), and a collection of stories, Things About to Disappear (LSU Press 1978 and Avon/Bard 1980).   He’s edited an anthology, Walking on Water and other stories (Univ. of Alabama Press, 1996), and co-edited Voicelust, a collection of essays ‘on style in contemporary fiction’ (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1985).

In 1997, he received the Robert Penn Warren Award conferred by the Fellowship of Southern Writers to “recognize an outstanding young Southern writer of fiction.”  In 2001, he was voted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and has since served on the board and (in 2009) been elected Vice Chancellor and (in 2011) Chancellor.  In 2005, the graduate students in the University of Tennessee’s Department of English voted Wier the department’s “most outstanding professor in the classroom.”In November, 2008, Wier received the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature.

He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas and the Texas Institute of Letters.  His fiction, essays, and reviews appear in such publications as The Southern Review, Five Points, The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, and the New York Times.  He was named Travel Writer of the Year (1994) by the Alabama Bureau of Travel.  In July of 2010, he was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Tennessee Arts Commission.

Wier is currently revising the draft of a novel, SKIN FOR SKIN, and he is completing a new volume of short stories.  He has taught at Longwood College, Carnegie-Mellon University, Hollins College, the University of Texas, Florida International University, the University of Alabama, and the University of Tennessee.  In the summer of 2012 he taught in the Univ. of New Orleans’ low-residency MFA program’s Edinburgh Workshop in Scotland. Born in Texas an only child, he grew up in Texas, Louisiana, and Mexico–where his father explored the jungles of Veracruz seeking ferns and flowers to import for the wholesale flower business in San Antonio.  He has degrees from Baylor University (BA), LSU (MA), and Bowling Green University (MFA).  Allen Wier has received the Hodges’ Chair for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.  He and his artist wife, Donnie, have a son, Wes, a musician and a student in video production.