Stephen Graham Jones
Department of English
College of Arts & Sciences

Stephen Graham Jones’s first publication was during his first semester doing his M.A. work, a story called “Paleogenesis, circa 1970,” in Black Warrior Review. Soon after, he discovered Thomas Pynchon and Philip K. Dick and has no clue how he ever pretended to have gotten along without them. He finally wound up at Florida State, snagged a Ph.D. there, then lucked into getting his dissertation published. Back then, it was called For There Needed No Horses (a Kafka-line), but by the time the book got published, it would be titled The Fast Red Road, A Plainsong. He was working in the warehouse at Sears at that time, moving fridges all day – yes, with his back, which was soon to be trashed, stranding Jones in the land of desk jobs. To celebrate The Fast Red Road‘s publication, Jones and his wife ate a plate of fried zucchini at a sit-down restaurant. It tasted very good. His next novel was All the Beautiful Sinners. It was not his second book, just his second published book. He wrote five between The Fast Red Road and All the Beautiful Sinners. One of them, The Bird is Gone: A Manifesto, came out right after All the Beautiful Sinners. He has written a few since then, too – he can’t seem to stop.