2006 Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing

Ron Tanner of Baltimore, Maryland, won Lyon College’s 2006 Visiting Fellowship in Creative Writing.  Tanner has published stories in such magazines as The Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, and Story Quarterly.  His work has been anthologized in Best of the West, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and Twenty Under Thirty: Early Work of America's Influential Writers. 

Awards for his short fiction include a James Michener Fellowship from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the New Letters Fiction Prize, the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Award for Short Fiction (judged by Tim Gautreaux), a Pushcart Prize for Fiction, and the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for his collection of stories, A Bed of Nails.  The judge of that competition, Janet Burroway, calls Ron Tanner’s stories “fabulously imaginative, experimental, witty, often breathtaking.” 

Tanner is a graduate of the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  He earned a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Wisconsin and is Chair of the Writing Department at Loyola College, where he has taught for fifteen years.
He was in residence at Lyon College for the first six weeks of the spring 2006 semester.  He taught the six-week advanced fiction writing intensive and gave a public lecture, reading, and conducted a one-day fiction-writing workshop.