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Stephanie Powell Watts

Biography

Stephanie Powell Watts

Stephanie Powell Watts won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence for her debut story collection, WE ARE TAKING ONLY WHAT WE NEED (2012), also named one of 2013’s Best Summer Reads by O: The Oprah Magazine. Her short fiction has been included in two volumes of the Best New Stories from the South anthology and honored with a Pushcart Prize.

Ms. Powell Watts’ stories explore the lives of African Americans in fast food and factory jobs, working door to door as Jehovah’s Witness ministers, and pressing against the boundaries of the small town, post-integration South. Her debut novel, NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US, follows the return of a successful native son to his home in North Carolina and his attempt to join the only family he ever wanted but never had. As Ms. Powell Watts describes it, “Imagine THE GREAT GATSBY set in rural North Carolina, nine decades later, with desperate black people.”

Born in the foothills of North Carolina, with a PhD from the University of Missouri and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she now lives with her husband and son in Pennsylvania where she is an associate professor at Lehigh University.

Stephanie Powell Watts

Books by Stephanie Powell Watts

by Stephanie Powell Watts - Fiction

NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US is a revelatory debut from an insightful voice; with echoes of THE GREAT GATSBY, it is an arresting and powerful novel about an extended African American family and their colliding visions of the American Dream.