
A widely-celebrated writer and the winner of many literary awards, he is the first 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. In March, 2010, he self-published "Briefs," a new collection of microstories, on Lulu.com. Stories from the book have already been selected for the O Henry Prize for 2010 and the Best African-American Fiction 2010 award. His nonfiction book Brothers and Keepers received a National Book Award. He grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA and much of his writing is set there, especially in the Homewood neighborhood of the East End. He graduated from Pittsburgh's Peabody High School, then attended 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 (New College, Oxford University, England), graduating in 1966. He also graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Critics Circle nomination, and his memoir Fatheralong was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur genius grant. Wideman was chosen as winner of the Rea Award for the Short Story in 1998, for outstanding achievement in that genre. In 1997, his novel The Cattle Killing won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction. 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 he sits on the contributing editorial board of the literary journal Conjunctions.
Books

American Histories
2018

SENT FOR YOU YESTERDAY
1981

My Soul Has Grown Deep
Classics of Early African-american Literature
2001

All Stories are True
1993

Hoop Roots
2001

The Cattle Killing
1996

DAMBALLAH
1986

God's Gym
Stories
2005

Fever
1989

The Island Martinique
2003

The Homewood Books
1985

Writing to Save a Life
The Louis Till File
2016

Brothers and Keepers
1984

Fanon
2008

The Lynchers
1973

You Made Me Love You
Selected Stories, 1981-2018
2021

Philadelphia Fire
1990

The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction
Fifty North American Stories Since 1970
1999

Stories of John Edgar Wideman
1992

Two Cities
1997

Fatheralong
1994

Slaveroad
2024

Look for Me and I'll Be Gone
Stories
2021

Briefs
2010

HIDING PLACE
1981