Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Faculty

Pam Durban

Pam Durban is the author of five books: two collections of short stories, Soon and All Set About with Fever Trees, and three novels, The Laughing Place, So Far Back, and The Tree of Forgetfulness.

Her fiction and non-fiction has been published in many magazines and anthologies. Her short story, “Soon,” was anthologized in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike, and her work has also been anthologized in New Stories from the South, The Year’s Best. Her story “Gravity” from the 1997 edition of New Stories was also included in the 20^th anniversary edition of that series. Her essay, “Clocks,” first published in Shenandoah, appeared in the 2007 edition of The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Small Presses.

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award as well as a James Michener Creative Writing Fellowship from the University of Iowa; the Crazyhorse Fiction Award and the Goodheart Prize from Shenandoah. Her novel, So Far Back, received the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Fiction.

She was a founding editor of Five Points magazine and served for five years as fiction editor of that publication.

Ms. Durban was born in Aiken, South Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. She teaches at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill where she is the Doris Betts Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing.