Lex Williford holds an MFA from the University of Arkansas and has taught in the writing programs at Southern Illinois University and the University of Alabama and was a Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Missouri, St. Louis in 2002.  His novella, Balsa and Tissue Paper, was as a selection in both the Ploughshares Solos Fall 2019 long-form issue and as an e-book; his novella in flash, Superman on the Roof, won the 2016 Rose Metal Press Flash Fiction Award book; and his book of stories, Macauley’s Thumb, won the 1993 Iowa School of Letters Award for Short Fiction.  His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in American Literary Review, Elm Leaves Journal, Fiction, Glimmer Train Stories, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Kansas Quarterly, Laurel Review, Natural Bridge, The Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market, Poets & Writers, Quarterly West, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, Smokelong Quarterly, the Southern Review, Sou’wester, StoryQuarterly, Tameme, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Water~Stone and Witness; his stories have been anthologized in W. W. Norton’s Flash Fiction, Persea Books’ Sudden Flash Youth, The Iowa Award: The Best Stories, 1991-2000 and The Best of  Witness: 1987-2004, The Eloquent Short Story, the Rose Metal Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, Sleep is a Beautiful Color, the UK’s 2017 National Flash Fiction Day anthology, and elsewhere.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Blue Mountain Center, the Centrum Foundation, the Djerassi Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the Millay Colony, the Ragdale Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Villa Montalvo, the Wurlitzer Foundation and Yaddo.  Coeditor, with Michael Martone, of the popular Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction, he is the founding director of the online MFA program and a recent chair of the on-campus bilingual MFA program at the University of Texas at El Paso. 

Website: www.lexwilliford.com

Twitter Username: @lexwilliford

Employment

• Assistant Professor at University of Texas at El Paso (August 2000 - August 2007)
• Associate Professor at University of Texas at El Paso (August 2007 - May 2013)
• Founding Director of the Online MFA Program at University of Texas at El Paso (August 2006 - August 2011)
• Assistant Professor at University of Alabama (September 1994 - May 1999)
• Lecturer in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (September 1990 - May 1994)
• Instructor at Auburn University (September 1987 - May 1990)
• Chair at Bilingual Program in Creative Writing (January 2014 - )

Degrees

• Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (Fiction) from University of Arkansas (May 1987)
• Master of Arts in English from Stephen F. Austin State University (May 1984)
• Bachelor of Arts in English/Journalism from Stephen F. Austin State University (May 1978)

Genres of Interest

Fiction, Creative nonfiction, Screenwriting, Children's literature , Poetry